A MAJOR WORK
OF OUR TIME
Often criticized, and all-too-rarely understood,
the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre encom-
passes the dilemmas and aspirations of the
individual in contemporary society. Being and
Nothingness contains the basic tenets of his
thought. A work of inherent power and epic
scope, it provides a vivid analysis for all who
would understand one of the most influential
philosophic movements of this or any age.
Tliis edition contains the complete text, trans-
lated and with an Introduction and Key to
Special Terminology by Hazel E. Barnes. A
biography of Jean-Paul Sartre appears bn the
last page, following the index.
A PHENOMEHOLOGICAL ESSAY ON ONTOLOGY
JEAN-PAU&W
SA
Translated and with an introduction by
HAZEL E. BARNES
University of Colorado
\VSP
n
WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS NEW YORK
WSP
A Washington Square Press Publication of
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster. Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y 10020
Copyright ® 1956 by Philosophical Library. Inc
Published by arrangement with Philosophical Library . Inc
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof m any form whatsoc' er
For information address Philosophical Library, Inc ,
15 East 40th Street, New York. N Y 10016
ISBN. 0-671-49606-9
First Pocket Books printing May, 1966
20 19 18 17 16 15 14
WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS. WSP and colophon arc-
registered trademarks of Simon 6c Schuster, Inc
Printed in the USA
Table o
Translator’s Preface
Translator’s Introduction
introduction
The Pursuit of Being
I. The Phenomenon _
n. The Phenomenon of Being and the Bemg
of the Phenomenon , , „ •
HL The Pre-Reflective Cogito and the Bemg of me
Percipere
W. The Being of the Percipi
Y. The Ontological Proof
VL Being-In-Itself
PART ONE
The Problem of Nothingness
Chapter One. The Origin of Negation
L The Question
n. Negations
III. The Dialectical Concept of Nothingness
r
V
v5 AND NOTHINGNESS
Phenoraenological’*GOTcept of Nothingness
vl'^e Origin of Nothingne'ss\
/' ‘"^'W
IGhapter Two. Bad Faith ^
: ; I. Bad Faith and Falsehood - i
vll.'' Patterns of Bad Faith ” '
HI. The “Faith” of Bad Faith’
■ PART.TWO
w ^ ^ *
^ - - -BEING-fOR-lTSELF
49
56
86
86
96
112
Chapter One. Immediate Structures of the For-Itself 119
I. Presence to Self 119
n. The Facticity of the For-Itself 127
ni. The For-Itself and the Being of Value 133
rv. The For-ltself and the Being of Possibilities 147
V. The Self and the Circuit of Selfness 155
Chapter Two. Temporality - 159
I. Phenomenology of the Three Temporal
Dimensions 159
II. The Ontology of Temporality 187
III. Original Temporality and Psychic Temporality:
Reflection 21 1
Chapter Three. Transcendence 238
I. Knowledge as a Type of Relation Between the
For-Itself and the In-Itself 240
II. Determination as Negation 249
III. Quality and Quantity, Potentiality,
Instrumentahty 257
IV. The Time of the World 279
V. Knowledge 294
PART THREE
Being-for-Others
Chapter One. The Existence of Others
I. The Problem
II. The Reef of Solipsism
III. Husserl, Hegel, Heidegger
rv. The Look
301
301
303
315
340
TABLE OF CONTENTS
\
Chapter Two. The Body 401
I. The Body as Being-For-Itself; Facticity 404
H. The Body-For-Others 445
TTT- The Third Ontological Dimension of the Body 460
Chapter Three. Concrete Relations With Others 471
I. First Attitude Toward Others: Love, Language,
Masochism - _ 474
n. Second Attitude Toward Others: Indifference,
Desire, Hate, Sadism 494
nL “Being-With” (Mitsein) and the “We” 534
PART FOUR
Having, Doing, and Being
Chapter One. Being and Doing: Freedom 559
L Freedom: The First Condition of Action 559
n. Freedom and Facticity: The Situation 619-
ni. Freedom and R^ponsibility 707
Chapter Two. Doing and Having 712
L Existential Psychoanalysis 712
n. “Domg” and “Having”: Possession 734
UL Quality as a Revelation of Being 765
CONCLUSION
I. In-Itself and For-Itself: Metaphysical Implications 785
n. Ethical Implications 795
&ey to Special Terminology
Index
799
809
Translator’s Preface
This is a translation of all of Jean-Paul Salve’s L'etre et
le neant. It includes those selections which in 1953 were
published in a volume entitled Existential Psychoanalysis,
but I have revised my earlier translation of these and made a
number of small changes in technical terminology.
I should like to thank Mr. Forrest Williams, my colleague
at the University of Colorado, who has helped me greatly
in preparing this translation. Mr. Williams’ excellent under-
standing of both Sartre’s philosophy and the French lan-
guage, and his generous willingness to give his time and
effort have been invaluable to me.
I want also to express my appreciation to my friend, Mr,
Robert O. Lehnert, who has read large sections of the book
and offered many helpful suggestions and who has rendered
the task more pleasant by means of stimulating discussions
which we have enjoyed together.
Finally I am indebted to the University of Colorado,
which through the Council on Research and Creative Work
has provided funds for use in the preparation of the type-
script.
In a work as long as this there are certain to be mistakes,
Smee I am the only one who has checked the translation in
its entirety, I alone am responsible for whatever errors there
may be. I hope that these may be few enough so that the
work may be of benefit to those readers who prefer the ease
of their own language to the accuracy of the original.
Hazel E. Barnes
University of Colorado
_ vm
Translator’s Introduction
It has been interesting to watch existentialism ron ttoongh
what William James called “the classic stages of a theoiy s
career.” -Any new theory, said James, first is attacked
as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and
insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its
adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. er
tainly existentialism is way beyond the first stage,^ As regM s
Jean-Paul Sartre specifically it is a long time since serious
philosophers have had to waste time and energy in showmg
that his philosophy is more than the unhappy reactions of
France to the Occupation and post-war distress. And there
are signs that even the third stage has been approached. Stern,
for example, while never claiming that he himself has antici-
pated Sartre’s views, does attempt to show for each of Sartre s
main ideas a source in the work, of another philosopher.^
* William James. Pragmatism: New Name for Some Old Ways of
Thinking. New York; Longmans, Green, and Co. 1949. p. 198.
* Alfred Stem. Sartre: Sis Philosophy and Psychoanalysts. New York:
Li^ral Arts Press. 1953. This list includes Nietzsche, -- Kafka, Salacrou,
, Heidegger, Croce, Marx, Hegel, Caldwell, Faulkner, Adler, Sclmitzler,
Malraux, Bachelard At times Stem seems almost to imply that Sartre is
guilty of wilfully concealing his source. On page 212 he says that Sartre
is not eclectic. On page 166 he declares that Sartre’s creative talent is
feminine and needs to be inseminated and stimulated by other peoplel
IX
X
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Yet critics of Sartre’s works stiU tend to deal with them
piecemeal, to limit themselves to worrying about the original-
ity of each separate position, to weighing two isolated ideas
against each other and testing them for consistency without
relating them to the basic framework.^ But one can no more
understand Sartre’s view of freedom, for instance; without
considering his peculiar description of consciousness than one
can judge Plato’s doctrine that knowledge is recoUection
without relating it to the theory of the Ideas. What critics
usually fail to see is that Sartre is one of the very few tn^en-
tieth-century philosophers to present us with a total system.
One may at will accept or reject this system, but one is not
justified in considering any of its parts in isolation from the
whole. The new insights which Sartre offers us are sufficiently
basic to put all of the familiar concepts in a wholly different
light.
In a brief introduction I can not hope to deal with the
mass of detailed evidence needed to show the full scope of
Sartre’s thought, but I should, like to do two things: first, I
think it would be profitable to consider briefly earlier works
of Sartre’s which serve as a kind of foundation for the fuller
discussion in Being and Nothingness; second, I should like
to discuss a few of the crucial problems presented in the
latter work. In connection with the earlier writing, I shall be
concerned only with those aspects which seem to me to be
significantly connected with fundamental positions in Being
and Nothingness; in the second part I am making no claim
to presenting a full analysis or exposition of the book but
merely offering some general comments as to a possible inter-
pretation of certain central positions.
In 'an article called “La Transcendance de L’Ego. Esquisse
d’une description phenomenologique”^ (1936) Sartre, while
keeping within the general province of phenomenology,
challenged Husserl’s concept of the transcendental Ego. The
article does more than to suggest some of the principal ideas
of Being and Nothingness. It analyzes in detail certain
fundamental positions which though basic in the later work
8 The most notable exception to this statement is Francis Jeanson, who
likewise deplores this tendency on the part of most of Sartre’s criUcs.
Le pToblime moral et la pensSe de Sartre. Paris: Editions du Myrte, 1947.
*In Recherches phllosophlques. Vol. VI, 1936-1937. pp. 85-123. [rronr-
cendence of the Ego. An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness translated by
Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick. New York: Noonday Press. 1957.]
xt
. ■ slcetched to « „j tte Cart-.-
Wfte J tiad
|art!?lS“^“4“So““^i^ ‘’Tan ot«>. Tii
»»^*rwtaT« TaS a 8^?^= “* i:ras -certam^ ®"'
a ^doubting
«VT^s' iSf « ^s,
teaectW. “Tdoubting 1*'° Tever itseU leaec-
eoiciousness of 4°.*'™®^ ^„pto but jas nev of
te nw , l the obieel «taab d a ^
"■-' - ,=.•;.»■ ”v£-Si"5
would to'";"'' T, self but on the P'^Tousness, it
- !»“ -itf
is so. The »eiy itself are “ s of being con-
for it to be and 1 object is conscio „„sciousness is
112) Consciousness ^ nature a that
scions of an o»iect. WS^S tTlct When 1 am
selfxonsciousness but .T Tous='><>“ .
the self is non-reBectively c awareness,
aware of a ch ir, a ^ jjt^ajately thinh ^aly am
awareness. But when I » consciousness, and of
this is a >'>'a"V,"'': “‘Awareness or “f '«a“osit.onal self-
sexphcitly positmg mVc^^a eogito is a nonP
reflection, in®
xii BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
consciousness. Sartre uses the words conscience non-position-
elle (de) soi and puts the de in parentheses to show that
there is no separation, no positing of the self as an object of
consciousness. Similarly he speaks of it as a non-thetic self-
consciousness. Thetic or positional self-consciousness is con-
science de soi in which consciousness deliberately reflects upon
its own acts and states and in so far as is possible posits itself
as an object. The Cartesian cogito, of course, belongs to the
second order.
In this same article Sartre lays down two fundamental
principles concerning the pre-reflective consciousness which
are basic in his later work. First, he follows Husserl in hold-
ing that all consciousness is consciousness of something;
that is, consciousness is intentional and directive, pointing
to a transcendent object other than itself. Here is the germ
for Sartre’s later view of man’s being-in-the-world, for his
“ontological proof’ of the existence of a Being-in-itself which
is external to consciousness. Secondly, the pre-reflective
cogito is non-personal. It is not true that we can start with
some such statement as “I am conscious of the chair.” All
that we can truthfully say at this beginning stage is that
“there is (il y a) consciousness of the chair.” The Ego (includ-
ing both the “I” and the “Me”) does not come into existence
until the original consciousness has been made the object of
reflection. Thus there is never an Ego-consciousness but only
consciousness of the Ego. This is, of course, another reason
for Sartre’s objecting to the primacy of the Cartesian cogito,
for Descartes was actually trying to prove the existence of the
“L”
According to Sartre, the Ego is not in consciousness, which
is utterly translucent, but in the world; and like the world it
is the object of consciousness. This is not, of course, to say
that the Ego is material but only that it is not a subject
which in some sense manipulates or directs consciousness.
Strictly speaking, we should never say “my consciousness”
but rather “consciousness of me.” This startling view is less
extreme than it at first appears. It does not mean that con-
sciousness is general, a universal pan-psyche. A conscious-
ness is even at the start particular, for the objects of which
it is conscious are particular objects and not the whole uni-
verse. Thus the consciousnesses of two persons are always
individual and always self-consciousnes^, but to be individ-
ual and to be self-conscious does not mean to be personal.
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xih'
Another way of putting it is to say that the Ego is “on the
side of the psychic.” (p. 106) Sartre makes a sharp distinc-
: don between the individual consciousness in its purity and
psychic qualities, by which he means what is ordinarily
: bought of as the personality. What he calls the popular view
. holds that the Ego is responsible for psychic states (e.g.,
love, hate) and that these in turn determine our conscious-
ness! The reality, he claims, is exactly the reverse. Conscious-
' ness determines the state, and the states constitute the Ego.
For example, my immediate reaction of repulsion or attraction
1 to someone is a consciousness. The unity which the reflective
* consciousness establishes between this reaction and earlier
; similar ones constitutes my state of love or hate. My Ego
t stands as the ideal unity of all of- my states, qualities, and
actions, but as such it is an object-pole, not a subject It
; is the “flux of Consciousness constituting itself as the unity
j of itself.” (p. 100) Thus the Ego is a “synthesis of interior-
\ ity and transcendence.” (p. Ill) The interiority of the pre-
{ reflective consciousness consists in the fact that for it to
y know itself and to be are the same; but this pure interiority
; can only be lived, not contemplated By definition pure interi-
, ' ority can not have an “outside.” When consciousness tries to
! turn back upon itself and contemplate itself, it can reflect
; on this interiority but only by making it an object. The Ego
I is the interiority of consciousness when reflected upon by
i itself. Although it stands as an object-pole of the unreflective
I attitude, it appears only in the world of reflection,
j Less technically we may note that the Ego stands in
I the same relation to all the psychic objects of consciousness
as the unity called “the world” stands in relation to the
i physical objects of consciousness. If consciousness directs
\ 'j'Pop any one of its own acts or states, upon any psychic
f object, this points to the Ego in exactly the same way that any
■ physical object points to “the world.” Both “world” and
I transcendent objects — ^in reality, ideal unities. They
I amer however in that the psychic is dependent on conscious-
and in one sense has been constituted by it whereas
? 0 jecte in the world are not created by consciousness. As
I iQt the r and the “Me,” these are but two aspects of the
; ego, distinguished according to their function. The “I” is
’ o.f unity of actions, and the “Me” that of states and
; qualiUes.
I Three consequences of this position should perhaps be
XIV
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
noted in particular, one because it is a view ^^^i^^Jartre
later explicidy abandoned, the other two because, although
merely suggested in this article, they form the basis for some
of the most significant sections of Being and Nothingness.
First, Sartre claims that once we put the “1”^ out of
consciousness and into the world (in the sense that it is nov!
the object and not the subject of consciousness) we have
defeated any argument for solipsism. For while we can still
say that only absolute consciousness exists as absolute, the
same is not true of the personal “1.” My “I” is no more
certain than the “I” of other people. Later, as we shall see,
Sartre rejected this as a refutation of solipsism and declared
that neither my own existence nor that of the Other can be
“proved” but that both are “factual necessities” which we
can doubt only abstraedy.
Second, Sartre believes that by taking the “I” and the
“Me” out of consciousness and by viewing consciousness as
absolute and non-personal, and as responsible for the con-
stitution of Being “as a world” and of its own activities as
an Ego, he has defended phenomenology against any charge
that it has taken refuge from the real world in an idealism.
If the Ego and the world are both objects of consciousness,
if neither has created the other, then consciousness by
establishing their relations to each other insures the active
participation of the person in the world.
Most important of all, there are in Sartre’s claim that
consciousness infinitely overflows the “I” which or din arily
serves to unify it, the foundation for his view of anguish,
the^ germ of his doctrine of “bad faith,” and a basis for his
belief in the absolute freedom of consciousness. “Conscious-
ness is afraid of its own spontaneity because it feels itself to
be beyond freedom.” (p. 120) In other words we feel vertigo
or anguish before our recognition that nothing in our onm
pasts or discernible personality insures our following any of
our usual patterns of conduct. There is nothing to prevent
consciousness from making a wholly new choice of its way
of being. By means of the Ego, consciousness can partially
^otect Itself from this freedom so limitless that it threatens
the very bounds of personality. “Everything happens as if
consciousness constituted the Ego as a false image of itself
hypnotized by this Ego which it
?s1he oS f absorbed in it.” Here undeveloped
the origin of bad faith, the possibility which consciousness
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
XV
possesses of wavering back and forth, demanding the priv-
ileges of a free consciousness, yet seeking refuge from the
responsibOities of freedom by pretending to be concealed
and confined in an already established Ego.
In The Psychology of Imagination,^ a treatise on
phenomenological psychology which was published in 1940,
we find the basis for Sartre’s later presentation of Nothing-
ness. The main text of the book is concerned with the differ-
ence between imagination and perception. Sartre rejects the
opinion commonly held that imagination is a vague or faded
perception. He points out that frequently the objects of
both are the same but that what distinguishes the two is the
conscious attitude toward the object. In the conclusion he
raises a question of much broader significance than the prob-
lem of efecting a phenomenological description of imagina-
tion. He asks two questions: (1) “Is the imaginary function
a contingent and metaphysical specification of the essence
‘consciousness,’ or should it rather be described as a constitu-
tive structure of that essence?’’ (2) Are the necessary con-
ditions for realizing an imaginative consciousness “the same
or different from the conditions of possibility of a conscious-
ness in general?’’
Throughout the book Sartre has been stressing the fact
that in imagination the object is posited either as absent,
as non-existent, as existing elsewhere, or as neutralized (i.e.,
not posited as existing) . Now in order to effect such a posit-
ing, consciousness must exercise its peculiar power of nihila-
tion {neantisation) . If an object is to be posited as absent or
not existing, then there must be involved the ability to
constitute an emptiness or nothingness with respect to it
Sartre goes further than this and says that in every act of
imagination there is really a double n&ilation. In this connec-
tion he makes an important distinction between being-in-the-
world and being-in-the-midst-of-the-world. To be in-the-
midst-of-the-world is to be one with the world as in the case
of objects. But consciousness is not in-the-midst-of-the-world;_
it is in-the-world. This means that consciousness is inevitably
involved with the world (both because we have bodies and
because by definition consciousness is consciousness of a tran-
scendent object) but that there is a separation between con-
^ L’lmaginatre, psychologte phSnomSnologique de Vimaglnation. Paris:
Galhrnard. 1940. Quotations are froin the English translation: The Psychol-
ogy of Imagination. New York: Philosophical Library. 1948.
XVJ
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
sdousness and the things in the world For consciousness m
its primary form, as we saw earlier, is a non-positional self-
consciousness; hence if consciousness is consciousn^ of an
object, it is consciousness of not being de object, ^ere is,
in short, a power of withdrawal in consciousness such that it
can nihilate (encase with a region of non-being) the objects
of which it is conscious. Imagination requires two of these
nihilating acts When we imagine, we posit a world in which
an object is not present in order that we may imagine a
world in which our imagined object is present. 1 do not
imagine a tree so long as I am actually looking at one. To
accomplish this imagining act, we must first be able to posit
the world as a synthetic totality. This is possible only for a
consciousness capable of effecting a nihilating withdrawal
from the world Then we posit the imagined object as existing
somehow apart from the world, thus denying it as being part
of the existing world.
Hence the imaginative act is constituting, isolating, and
nihilating It constitutes the world as a world, for before
consciousness there was no “world” but only full, undiffer-
entiated being It then nihilates the world from a particular
point of view and by a second act of nihilation isolates the
object from the world — as out-of-reach.
Once we accept this view of imagination, the answer to
Sartre’s two questions is clear. Obviously the conditions of
possibility for an imagining consciousness are the same as
for consciousness in general. Clearly the imaginary function is
constitutive of the essence of consciousness. To conceive of
a non-imagining consciousness is impossible. For if conscious-
ness could not imagine, this could only be because it lacked
the power of negating withdrawal which Sartre calls aihila-
tion; and this would result in so submerging consciousness
in the world that it could no longer distinguish itself from
the world. If it were possible to conceive for a moment a
consciousness which does not imagine, it would have to be
conceived ^ completely engulfed in the existent and without
grasping anything but the existent.”
j Sartre had already linked the ideas of
Nothingness and freedom. “In order to imagine, conscious-
ness must be free from all specific reality and this freedom
must be able to define itself by a “being-in-the-world which
IS at once the constitution and the negation of the world”
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
xvii
(p. 269) This means that consciousness must be able to ciTcct
the emergence of the “unreal.” “The unreal is produced out-
side of the world by a consciousness which stays in the world,
and it is because he is transcendentally free tliat man can
imagine.” (p. 272)
In The Emotions^ (1939) Sartre again discusses conscious-
ness’ constitution and organization of the world and from a
different point of view, but the underlying ideas of the total
involvement of consciousness in any of its acts and its possi-
bility of choosing freely the way in which it will relate itself
to the world remain the same. As we should expect, he com-
pletely rejects the idea that emotions are forces which can
sweep over one and determine consciousness and its actions.
Emotion is simply a way by which consciousness chooses to
live its relationship to the world. On what we might call the
everyday pragmatic level of existence, our perception con-
stitutes the world in terms of demands. We form a sort of
“hodological” map of it in which pathways are traced to and
among objects in accordance with the potentialities and resist-
ances of objects in the world. Thus if 1 want to go out into
the street, I must count on so many steps to be taken, furni-
ture to be avoided, a door to be opened, etc. Or to put it on
a non-material level, if I want to persuade someone of a course
of action, I must not only plan to use language which
means more or less the same to him as to me but must obsen'e
certain “rules” of intersubjective relations if I am to appeal
to his reason rather than to his prejudice; I must approach
him in terms of his experience instead of referring to what he
does not know, etc. In short, the objects which I want to
realize appear to me as “having to be realized” in certain
' ways. “The world of our desires, our needs, and our acts, ap-
pears as if it were furrowed with strict and narrow paths which
lead to one or the other determined end, that is, to the appear-
ance of a created object.” (p. 57) It mighi be compared to a
pin-ball machine in which the ball which one wants to end
up at a certain defined spot must arrive there by following
one of several possible paths filled with pits and barriers. All
of this is an anticipation of the hierarchy of “instrumental
'^Esqulsse d’une thiorte ties Emotions. Paris: Hermann. 1939. Quotations
are from the Engbsh translation by Bernard Frcchtraan: The Emotions'
Outline of a Theory. New York: Philosophical Library. 1948 I have dis-
cussed this after The Psychology of Imagination, even though the latter
was pubhshed a year later, because the order seemed a more natural one
in terms of Uie material which I have chosen for consideration.
XX
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
felt de trop in relation to the others. De trop. it was
the only relationship I could establish between these trees,
these gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count the chest-
nut trees, to locate them by their relationship to the
Velleda, to compare their height with the height of the
plane trees; each of them escaped the relationship in
which 1 tried to enclose it, isolated itself and over-
flowed. . . . And 1— soft, weak, obscene, digesting,
juggling with dismal thoughts — I, too, was de trop. . . .
Even my death would have been de trop. De trop, my
corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at
the back of the smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh
would have been de trop in the earth which would re-
ceive my bones, at last; cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper
and clean as teeth, it would have been de trop: I was
de trop for eternity.” (pp. 172-173)
This passage is echoed in Being and Nothingness where
Sartre uses almost the same words to describe Being-in-itself.
“Being-in-itself is never either possible or impossible.
It is. This is what consciousness expresses in anthropo-
morphic terms by saying that being is superfluous {de
trop) — that is, that consciousness absolutely can not
derive being from anything, either from another being,
or from a possibility, or from a necessary law. Un-
created, without reason for being, without any connec-
tion with another being, being-in-itself is de trop for
eternity.” (p. 29)
In the later work Sartre sharply contrasts this unconscious
being with Being-for-itself or consciousness. But the con-
tingency which Roquentin expresses still remains in the fact
ftat while the For-itself is free to choose its way of being.
It was never able either to choose not to be, or to choose not
to be free. Nor is there any meaning for its being, other than
what it makes for itself.
A second important theme in the novel is the concept of
nausea itself. Nausea is the “taste of my facticity,” the reve-
a ion o my body to me and of the fact of my inescapable
cSd urLT? ^®‘"8-|n-itself. In the novel Sartre is con-
tin’s npr* With the sensations accompanying Roquen-
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
xxi
“The thing which was waiting was on the alert, it has
pounced on me, it flows through me, I am filled with it
It’s nothing: I am the Thing. Existence, liberated,
detached, floods over me. I exist
“I exist. It’s sweet so sweet, so slow. And light:
you’d think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by
me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling
water in my mouth. I swallow. It slides down my throat
it caresses me — and now it comes up again into my
mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water
in my mouth — ^lying low — ^grazing my tongue. And this
pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me,”
(p. 134)
In Being and Nothingness Sartre, probably fortunately, is
not so much concerned with the sensations by which our
facticity is revealed to us. But the concept underlies his dis-
cussion of the body. Furthermore it is in conm-ction with the
study of facticity that he presents the most detailed analysis
of the problem of freedom, for it is the limitations offered
by man’s connections with external being which offer the
most serious threat to Sartre’s view that the For-itself is ab-
solutely free.
In Being and Nothingness, which as L’etre et le niant^
appeared in France’ in 1943, Sartre has incorporated the views
which I have mentioned here as well as a number of less
important themes found in scattered short stories and essays.
The basic positions have not been really changed, but
they have been enriched and elaborated and worked into
a systematic philosophy. The subject matter of this philosophy
is as all inclusive as the title indicates, and throughout a
large part of the book the treatment is fully as abstract. Yet
we might also say that it is a study of the human condition;
for since “man is the being by whom Nothingness comes
into the world,” this means that man himself is Being and
Nothingness. And before he has finished, Sartre has not only
considered such concrete problems as love, hate, sex, the
crises of anguish, the trap of bad faith, but he has sketched
in outline an approach by which we may hope to ascertain
® Paris: Gallunard.
xxii BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the original choice of Being by which real individuals have
made themselves what they are. ^ ^
The underlying plan of this comprehensive dcscnption
is comparatively simple. In the Iniroduciion which is by far
the most difficult part of the book, Sartre explains why we
must begin with the pre-rcflcctive consciousness, contrasts
his position with that of realism and of idealism, rejects any
idea of a noumenal world behind the phenomenon, and ex-
plains his own idea of the “transphenomcnality of Being,” He
then proceeds to present his distinction between unconscious
Being (Being-in-itself) and conscious Being (Being-for-itsclf).''
Obviously certain difficulties arise. In particular, since the two
types are radically different and separated from another, how
can they both be part of one Being?
In search of an answer Sartre in Part One focuses on the
question itself — as a question — and reveals the fact that
man (or the For-itself) can ask questions and can he in ques-
tion for himself in his very being because of the presence
in him of a Nothingness. Further examination of this
Nothingness shows that Non-being is the condition of any
transcendence toward Being. But /low can man be his own
Nothingness and be responsible for the upsurge of Nothing-
ness into the world? We learn that Nothingness is revealed to
us most fully in anguish and that man generally tries to flee
this anguish, this Nothingness which he is, by means of “bad
faith.” The study of “bad faith” reveals to us that whereas
Being-in-itself simply is, man is the being “who is what he is
not and who is not what he is.” In other words man contin-
ually makes himself. Instead of being, he “has to he”; his
present being has meaning only in the light of the future
toward which he projects himself. Thus he is not what at any
instant we might want to say that he is, and he is that toward
which he projects himself but which he is net yet.”' Tliis am-
biguity provides the possibility for bad faith since man may
try to interpret this evanescent “is" of his as though it were
the “is” of Being-in-itself, or he may fluctuate between the
two.
In Part Two Sartre, using this view of the For-itself as a
» S^re evidently got these terms from Hegel's nn-sich and /Sr-ifch.
The general psychological consequences of this distinction between
Bemg-for-itself and Bcing-in-ltseU 1 have discussed in some detail in my
introducuon to Jean-Paul Sartre's Existential Psychoanalysts. New Yorh:
Philosophical Library, 1953. v'' lori..
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xxiii
Nothingness and as an always future project, discusses the
For-itself as a pursuit of Being in the form of selfness. This
involves the questions of possibility, of value, and of tem-
porality, all of which prove to be integrally related to the
basic concept of the For-itself as an internal negation of
Being-in-itself. But if the For-itself is a relation to the In-
itself, even by way of negation, then we must find some
sort of bridge. This bridge is knowledge, the discussion of
which concludes Part Two.
Since no full presentation of knowledge is possible with-
out consideration of the senses, we are referred to the body.
Part Three begins with a discussion of the body, and we soon
perceive that one of the principal characteristics of a body
is that it causes me to be seen by the Other. Hence Part Three
is largely devoted to the study of Being-for-others, including
descriptions of concrete personal relations. Finally our dis-
coverv of our relations with others shows us that the For-
itself has an outside, that while never able to coincide with
the In-itself, the For-itself is nevertheless in the midst of it
And so at last in Part Four we return to the In-itself.
We are concerned with the In-itself from two fundamental
points of view. First how can we be in the midst of the
In-itself without losing our freedom? Here we find the fullest
exposition of Sartre’s ideas on freedom and facticity. Second,
we discover that our fimdamental relation to Being is such
that we desire to appropriate it through either action, posses-
sion, or the attempt to become one with it Analysis of these
reactions leads us to the question of our original choice of
Being, and it is here that Sartre outlines for us his existential
psychoanalysis. This completes the book save for the Conclu-
sion, in which Sartre suggests various metaphysical and
ethical implications which may emerge as the result of his
long “pursuit of Being” and also promises us another work
in which he will further develop the ethical possibilities.
Obviously the most strikingly original idea here present-
ed, as well as the unif5dng motif of the entire work, is the
position that consciousness is a Nothingness. Yet as a Noth-
ingness it is also a revelation of Being. Aside from the par-
adoxical nature of this position, we are immediately puzzled
as to how to relate it to the traditional theories of idealism
and realism; and I think that perhaps our best approach to
the whole question of the negativity of consciousness is to
observe just how Sartre himself believes that he can hold a
xxiv
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
theory not open to the objections generally directed against
either of the others. His philosophy is not idealism, not even
Husserl’s brand of idealism, as he points out, because Being
in no way creates consciousness or is in any way dependent
on consciousness for its existence. Being is already there,
without reason or justification. It is not exhausted by any or
by all of its appearances, though it is fully there in each one
of its appearances. (That is, it does not serve as a sort of
phenomenon with a noumenon behind it.) It always overflows
whatever knowledge we have of it — ^just as it is presupposed
by all our questions and by consciousness itself. This “trans-
phenomenality of Being” means that the object of conscious-
ness is always outside and transcendent, that there is forever
a resistance, a limit offered to consciousness, an external
something which must be taken into consideration. Never-
theless we have not substituted a realistic position for the
idealistic. For without consciousness. Being does not exist
either as a totality (in the sense of “the world,” “the uni-
verse”) or with differentiated parts. It is a fullness of exist-
ence, a plenitude v/hich can not possibly isolate one part
so as to contrast it with another, or posit a whole over against
. its parts, or conceive a “nothing” in opposition to which it is
“ever3dhing.” It is simply undifferentiated, meaningless mas-
sivity. Without consciousness there would not be a world.
mountains, rivers, tables, chairs, e/c.; there would be on/y
Being. In this sense /here is no thing without consciousness,
but there is not nothing. Consciousness causes there to be
things because it is itself nothing. Only through consciousness
is there differentiation, meaning, and plurality for Being.
There is a tendency among some of Sartre’s critics to
criticize him for this view of consciousness as negativity as
though it were somehow a slight to the dignity of the human
being and made things more important than people. Such
an objection seems unreasonable in the light of the tremendous
consequences of this Nothingness. The more difficult problem,
as it seems to me, is how to account for these consequences
without being false to the premise that consciousness is wholly
negative, that is, without making it into a very formidable
something. For when Sartre speaks of a Nothingness, he means
just that and is not using the word as a misleading name for
a new metaphysical substance. Yet the power to effect a
i"ake use of it appears to be
a positivity. If this power belongs to the For-itself, are we
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
xxv
falling into a contradiction? And if the For-itself is a Nothing-
ness, then in what sense is it Being?
In the Conclusion Sartre provides us with a helpful com-
parison by reminding us of a scientific fiction sometimes used
to illustrate the physical principle of the conservation of
energy.
“If, they say, a single one of the atoms which constitute
the universe, were annihilated, there would result a
catastrophe which would extend to the entire universe,
and this would be, in particular, the end of the Earth and
of the solar system. This metaphor can be of use to us
here. The For-itself is like a tiny nihilation which has
its origin at the heart of Being; and this nihilation is
sufficient to cause a total upheaval to happen to the In-
itself. This upheaval is the world.” (p. 786)
We can see in this comparison that the For-itself has no
reality except in so far as it is the nihilation of Being. It is,
however, slightly qualified in that it is the nihilation of an
individual, particular In-itself, It is not a general Nothingness
but a particular privation, an individual Non-Being. Just as
we might say, I suppose, that the catastrophe wrought ’by the
annihilated atom would vary in character according to which
atom was annihilated.
Does this mean then that we have one disintegrated Being
or a clear-cut case of duality with the In-itself on the* one
hand and the For-itself on the other? Sartre is not altogether
clear on this point He says that in formulating metaphysical
hypotheses to guide us in phenomenological psychology, an-
thropology, and so forth, we may, as we like, keep the old
being-consciousness dualism or adopt a new idea of a phe-
nomenon which will be provided with two dimensions of being
(In-itself and For-itself). But such hypotheses we may use
only as the physicist may employ ad libitum either the wave
theory or the quanta theory; that is, not with the idea that
either is an exhaustive description but that it is merely an
expedient hypothesis within which one may carry out experi-
ments.
_ In other passages Sartre makes it clear that Being-in-itself
IS logically prior to Being-for-itself, that the latter is depend-
ent on Being-in-itself, both in its origin and in its continued
tustory. In the original nihilation the For-itself is made-to-be
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
XXVI
{est ete) by the In-itself. Nothing external to Being caused
the rupture in the self-identity of Being-in-itself. It occurred
somehow in Being. Thus the For-itself would be a mere
abstraction without Being, for it is nothing save the empti-
ness of this Being and hence is not an autonomous substance.
It is Unselbstdndig. (p. 787) “But as a nihilation it is‘, and it
is in G priori unity with the in-itself.” (pp. 790-91) In an ef-
fort to make this point more clear, Sartre points out that if we
tried to imagine what “there was” before a world existed, we
could not properly answer “nothing” without making both
the “nothing” and the “before” retroactive. That is, Nothing
has no meaning without Being, for it is that which is Other
than Being. If there were somehow no Being, Nothing
would concomitantly disappear, (p. 49) As the emptiness of
a particular Being, every negation (by a reversal of Spinoza’s
famous^ statement) is a determination. Nothingness takes
on a kind of borrowed being. In itself it is not, but it gets
its efficacy concretely from Being. “Nothingness can be nihi-
ate o^y on the foundation of being; if nothingness can be
given, It IS neither before nor after being, nor in a general
way outside of bemg. Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of
Sr"; Beins-in-itself is logically
prior to Bemg-for-itscif; for the In-itself has no need of
^ plenitude, but the For-itself origi-
heSor^eiS ‘
onNS^iiroriSn dependent on the In-itself not
thJ but in Its continued existenca We have seen
aat consciousness is a revelation of Being and that fliL k
teerMneirTh ^ Nothingness slip ta beLen
/~„rflt?“tlS SZ'on
a nihilation enardTto°eS
real, thus to distinpiiich ^ “ emergence of the un-
image and perception ptr possible, between
develops consciousneL’ Nothingness Sartre
“internal negatiZ’ S
tion between two o^cts suTh thaf^?° V ^
the cup is not the table. But in an inf nei&er;— e.g.,
can em only in a consciouL^s negation, which
tion is affected in its beh.? S’ ^ the nega-
Its bemg. Thus consciousness perpetuity
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
xxvii
negates the In-itsel£ by realizing inwardly that it is not the
In-itself; it nihilates fte In-itself both as a whole and in
terms of individual in-itselfs or objects. And it is by means
of knowing what it is not that consciousness makes teown to
itself what it is. Thus again in its daily existence the For-itself
is seen to depend on the In-itself. For since it is nothing but
the nihilating consciousness of not being its objects, then once
more its being depends upon that of its objects. For con-
sciousness, too, negation is determination.
It is important to recall that Sartre says of man that he is
“the being by whom nothingness comes into the world.” He
does not deny to man any connection with beme. Havi >g
noticed how the For-itself is dependent on the In-itself, we
can perhaps see more clearly how Sartre can both declare
that the For-itself is nothing and yet treat it as if it were a
subdivision of Being and devote a volume of more than
seven hundred pages to a discussion of its nature and con-
sequences. By itself the For-itself is nothing at all and is
not even conceivable, just as a reflection or a shadow which
would not be a reflection or shadow of anything could not
be conceived. But in relation to being, by being the nothing-
ness of a particular being and thus deriving from the being
which it nihilates a sort of marginal, dependent being, it can
give a new significance 'to all of Being. Thus the For-iis.If
is without any of that fullness of being which we call the
In-itself, but as a nihilation it is.
Sartre sununarizes this position by saying, “For conscious-
ness there is no being except for this precise obligation to be
a revealing intuition of something.” (p. 786) Immediately
he recognizes that this definition is closely parallel to Plato’s
category of the Other^^ as described in the Sophist. We note
that with Plato, too. Otherness has no being except its being-
other, but as Other it is. In Plato’s description we note also
the Other’s characteristic of marginal or borrowed being, the
tnck of disappearing if considered by itself, its complete
separation from Being at the same time that it cannot exist
independently from Being. Sartre feels that Plato failed to see
the logi(^l consequence of his position, which would be that
such an “otherness” could exist only in the form of conscious-
ness. “For the only way in which the other can exist as other
IS to be consciousness (of) being other. Otherness is, in fact,
This, of course, is not to be confused with ‘The Other” as Sartre
*eneraUy uses it to denote other people.
xxviii BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
an internal negation, and only a consciousness can be con-
stituted as an internal negation.” (p. 787) He also criticizes
Plato for having restricted both categories — being _ and
“other” — to a dialectical genesis in which they are simply
genera. Sartre, of course, holds that the For-itself is an indi-
vidual venture and he is speaking of concrete being and
living consciousness. _
Sartre in his discussion of Nothingness presents a fairly
detailed criticism of both Hegel’s and Heidegger s concepts.
Hegel he criticizes for never having got beyond the logical
formulation of Non-Being so as to relate it to human reality.
Moreover he objects to Hegel’s making the notions of Being
and Non-being contemporary instead of viewing Non-being
as logically dependent on Being. And he objects that Hegel
has inadvertently bestowed a being upon Non-being. Heideg-
ger, according to Sartre, has realized considerable progress
by removing Being from Nothingness and by seeing both
Being and Non-being as a tension of opposing forces; he is
also to be commended for discussing Nothingness as a part
of human experience and not merely as an abstraction. But
Sartre feels that Heidegger by causing the world to be sus-
pended in Nothingness takes away all possibility of account-
ing for any origin for nihilations. Also the experience of
Nothingness in dread which Heidegger describes (an ex-
perience in which one feels, though one cannot intellectually
know it, the slipping away of all-that-is into the Nothingness
in which it is suspended) — this, Sartre says, can in no way
explain the infinite little pools of Nothingness which make a
part of our everyday life. It can not account for the Non-
being which is involved in every question, in every negative
judgment, in prohibitions, in ideas like “destruction” and
distance.” Both Hegel and Heidegger, Sartre objects, have
talked about Nothingness without providing a being in
which this Nothingness is founded and which can establish
the negations effected by this nihilating power. In short they
both neglect the structure of the human mind or conscious-
ness.
I think that Sartre has avoided the objections which he
feels must be raised against Plato, Hegel, and Heidegger. In
a sense one might say that his treatment of perception and
magmation and knowledge all involve the old logical rela-
tionship between determination and negation, that the internal
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION xxi'x
negation itself is a logical distinction .12 But even if we grant
this point, we must recognize that he is doing it in terms of
the structure of the mind and not of an order effected within
the products of the mind or within the world itself. Moreover,
he believes that the original choice of consciousness antedates
logic itselfj that by a pre-logical choice we decide whether or
not we will confine ourselves within the rules of logic. In
connection with the emotions we have seen that consciousness
may, if it chooses, use its nihiiating power for a complete —
though ineffective and temporary — annihilation of the
world. Sartre has not restricted the use of Nothingness to
concepts and relations. He uses it in his discussion of anguish,
which reveals considerable indebtedness to Heidegger’s treat-
ment of dread. He uses it in his discussion of ethics, where
he shows that the particular dilemma of the human being
stems from the fact that there is always a Nothingness between
motive and act, that a motive becomes a motive only when
freely constituted by the free nihilation effected by conscious-
ness. And finally he uses it in his discussion of freedom.
Consciousness is free because it is “not enough.” If it were
full being, then it could not be free to choose being. But since
it has an insufficiency of being, since it is not one with the
real world, it is free to set up those relations with being which
It desires.
Thus the For-itself is a revelation of Being, an internal
nihilation of Being, a relation to Being, a desire of Being,
and a choice of Being.^s ^11 of these it can he, only because
it is not Being. There is no question about the fact that Sartre
throws the whole weight of being over onto the side of the
In-itself, but in terms of significance and activity it is the
For-itself which is responsible for everything — even though it
could not be without the In-itself. While the comparison is
admittedly a bit farfetched, I can not help being reminded in
“In his discussion of nihilation, especially in connection with perception
fin iniagination* Sartre makes considerable use of the Gestalt psychology,
particularly as related to the mind’s treatment of “figure” and "ground.”
“Wilfnd Desan has worked out a detailed chart showing the relations
S between the In-itself and the For-itself in its capacity as ‘'Noth-
iDgness of Being, revelation of Being, etc." The Tragic Finale. Cambridge,
of Jt 'i 1954. p, 50. Desan’s book is the most detailed analysis
with ^oihlngness to be found in Enghsh. Although I disagree
to! 1 ^ conclusions, I believe that he has attempted to see the
Significance of Sartre’s philosophy as well as to analyze its various
parts.
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
this connection of Schopenhauer’s Reason, which created by
the Will turns back upon the Will to deny it.
As I pointed out above, Sartre criticizes Heidegger tor
restricting his experience of Nothingness to special cri^s and
ignoring the host of everyday situations in which it figures.
It is interesting, however, to note that Sartre, on the other
hand, ignores an entire set of special experiences in which
the idea of Nothingness is tremendously important; namely,
the whole history of mysticism. It would be unreasonable to
expect him to have written a full essay on mysticism, after
all there is no room for it in his brand of existentialism. But
it is a little surprising that he has not considered the subject
at all, both because he is so frequently careful to provide
his own explanation for phenomena generally considered
religious and because there is in mystic literature much that
would have been fruitful for his analysis. I think that if we
but glance briefly at that part of the mystic ideal which is
pertinent, we find that here, as in connection with his specific
treatment of God, Sartre has either consciously or uncon-
sciously taken those elements of experience which for the
Believer are privileged, which are apart from ordinary living
and which are raised to the level of an ideal goal or at least
furnished with divine guarantee, and that Sartre has woven
these into the everyday data of the human condition.
We may note that the mystic’s use of the concept of
Nothingness differs from those already mentioned in (1)
applying the concept in the form of negative definition to
the ultimate reality, The One; (2) presenting the loss of
personality, which is a species of Nothingness, as an ideal
goal; (3) giving an irrational (one might almost say sensation-
al) cast to the whole experience. Without passing judgment
on the validity of the mystic approach, we can at any rate
observe that here, as with Sartre, the concept of Nothingness,
while continuing to be a denial of “everything,” becomes all
important and heavy with consequence. One may hazard
guesses as to how all of this came about. Probably here too
observation of the logical interdependence
°ii f Non-Being. If the One is to be different from
all of Being, then it is not Being. The loss of self is probably
due partly to the same cause (if we are to be one with God,
^ot-self) as well as to a desire to escape
^P^sibility for one's own being. Perhaps too, ob-
senauon of the way m which the senses tend to merge with
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
xxxi
one another, to become pain or numbness if intensified too
much, also the fact that sound becomes silence if carried too
high or too low may have strengthened the feeling that there
is an absolute surrounding Nothingness which has somehow
significant characteristics.^^
Sartre seems to have reduced aU of this to purely human
■data. Whereas the mystic sets up loss of the persondity as a
goal, Sartre begins with the non-personal consciousness. In
one sense our recognition of the existence of this conscious-
ness which transcends our Ego is still our salvation; for
acceptance of one’s absolute freedom is the only existence
commensurate with an honest desire to exist fully as
man. - But the recognition comes not in ecstasy but in an-
guish. It is not a merging with a higher power but a realiza-
tion of one’s isolation, not a vision of eternity but the per-
ception that one is wholly process, the making of a Self with
which one can not be united. The mystic looks inward and
learns to put away the Self and find himself united with
the One; the For-itself seeks to find the Self it can never
in any final sense possess. The mystic strives to surpass his
being in an absolute Nothingness which is somehow fulfilling;
the For-itself spends its life in a futile pursuit of Being and
tries in vain to escape the nothingness which it is. ,
We have seen that as Nothingness the For-itself is not
only the internal negation and revelation of Being but also
the desire and the Choice of Being. I should like next to
examine these last two aspects of the For-itself since on these
levels we may see more clearly the significance of Sartre’s
view in relation to theology, which he attempts to supplant,
and to psychology, which he would greatly modify. When
we -view consciousness as desire, we find the same situation
-.which we have encountered before; that is, its essential
structure is negative but the results fully positive. Here as
wways consciousness is consciousness of something; thus we
now that it is consciousness of its object as desirable.
Desire, like value, resides neither in the outside world nor in
consciousn^s. It is a way by which consciousness relates
itsen to objects of the world. Moreover just as consciousness
I am well aware that there are many types of mysticism and that for
me o them the characteristics which I have stated here would not be
^propnaie. 1 am thinking in particular of Neo-Platonism, but I believe
^ large proportion of other mysticism could be similarly
xxxii BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
is the revelation of particular objects on the ground of the
revelation of all of Being (as the world), so the For-itself
exists its specific desires on the ground of a fundamental
desire of Being. Each individual desire, however trivial, has
meaning only in connection with one’s fundamental relation
to Being {i.e., one’s basic choice of one’s mode of being, the
way in which one chooses to exist) . Thus somewhat paradoxi-
cally every concrete desire (and all desires are concrete) is
significant to Sartre as indicating the personal character of
the individual under consideration, but it is important not
by itself alone but because it points to the all pervasive
irreducible desirf which reveals to us the person. Sartre’s view
is that since the For-itself in its relation to objects is con-
fronting the In-itself, this means that if it desires these ob-
jects, it is desiring to appropriate the In-itsclf. In other words,
it desires Being, either directly in the sense that it wants to
assimilate or be assimilated with Being and become one with
it or indirectly by first possessing (having) Being in the
form of the world.
There seems to me to be a slight difficulty here. For on
the one hand Sartre seems to say that we can grasp the in-
dividuality of the human being by tracking down this irre-
ducible choice. On the other hand, he says that every For-
itself (with the possible exception of one which has effected
an existentialist type of katharsis) basically desires to be one
with the In-itseLf (thus gaining an absolute security and
certainty, by being a self, a fullness of being) without, how-
ever, ceasing to be freely responsible for this self and without
ceasing to be aware of thus founding one’s own being. Clearly
this desire, as Sartre says, is irrational; one can not both be
beyond the need of self-foundation and be responsible for
achieving it. It is both the desire of being caused (hence
absolute, justified) and the desire of being the cause. In short,
the ideal desired is that Causa Sui which we call God. Man
desires to be God! The religious implications of this posi-
tion we may examine later. At present we may note that if
this desire is true of all or almost all persons, then it is hard
to see just how the ultimate choice of Being is revelatory of
the individual. At most there would seem to be but a few
basic types. The answer seems to lie in the kinds of objects
by which the individual chooses to work out this basic choice.
In this way there is created an infinite variety of possibilities
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
xxxin
for people as we know them. In any case it may be said
-that the hypothesis that one’s personality is reducible to the
basic attitude which is assumed by the For-itself confronting
the In-itself and its own lack of Being is no more a threat to
the variety of personality structures than the concept of the
Freudian libido or the Adlerian will to power. Sartre
obviously feels that it is far less so.
It is interesting to see how Sartre’s general concept of
desire comes close to paralleling philosophical positions to
which existentialism is basically opposed. Here as in connec-
tion with the notion of Nothingness it is perhaps best not to
.think that Sartre is borrowing from other systems uninten-
tionally and then perhaps in spite of himself coinciding with
them, but rather that he is giving a new interpretation of
aspects of experience so basic that he can not ignore them any
more than'any other philosopher who would be comprehen-
sive. There is, for example, a sense in which the Sartrian de-
sire parallels the concept of Eros in Plato’s Symposium. In
both writers the individual desire is meaningful only in the
larger context of a desire for Being. But of course the differ-
ence is striking since the Platonic Eros leads one through less
important stages to the philosophical vision of absolute truth
whereas Sartrian desire leads only to a non-existent ideal which
is basically self-contradictory and irrational. The continued
pursuit of this ideal with Sartre is a way of trying to escape
from one’s self -responsibility and is definitely not man’s high
destiny. And here desire is positive, if at all, only on the inter-
vening levels. As compared vrith Plato, Sartre’s view might
appear the more negative (whether true or not is, of course,
another question).
If compared with Epicurus, on the other hand, Sartre’s
position is seen to be definitely opposed to a philosophy
which advocated the repression of all but the most moderate
desires. Ataraxia is about as far removed from the existential-
ist ideal of passionate commitment as one can get. The diver-
gency becomes still more apparent if we compare Sartre’s view
with that of certain Eastern philosphies which identify desire
With suffering and advocate the total annihil ation of desire as
a means of salvation. Here there are two important disagree-
place, with Sartre, to destroy all desire
destroy the For-itself — ^not in the nothingness
0 Nirvana but absolutely. A satisfied For-itself would no
XXXIV
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
longer be a For-itself. The For-itself is desire; that is, it is
the nihilating project toward a Being which it can never have
or be but which as an end gives the For-itself its meaning.
In the second place, desire is not placed on the same level by
Sartre and, for example. Buddhism. In the latter, desire is
the quality of the lesser personalized Self which must be de-
stroyed if one is to realize one’s greater non-personal poten-
tialities. But with Sartre, desire in its most fundamental sense
belongs not to the psyche but to the non-personal conscious-
ness. Only the derived specific desires are determined and-
evaluated in terms of the Ego, which, we may recall, is itself
an object of consciousness. Here again we find that the goal
of Buddhism is part of Sartre’s human data. Guilt for Bud-
dhism lies in the specific desires of the personal self; guilt
for Sartre is cherishing the illusion of possessing an absolute
Self.
This discussion of desire leads us naturally into another
major topic, a second primary aspect of Sartre’s work which,
fully as much as his emphasis on the negativity of conscious-
ness, is the object of hostile attack and misunderstanding —
his atheism. There is a sense in which Sartre has obeyed the
requirements of Klierkegaard’s “Either-Or” more literally than
most of his critics. The God he rejects is not some vague
power, an unknown X which would account for the origin
of the universe, nor is it an ideal or a mythus to symbolize
man’s quest for the Good. It is specifically the God of the
Scholastics or at least any idea of God as a specific, all
powerful, absolute, existing Creator. Many people who con-
sider themselves religious could quite comfortably accept
Sartre’s philosophy if he did not embarrass them by making
his pronouncement, “There is no God,” quite so specific.
Some even go so far as to insist that his philosophy is re-
ligious because it signifies an intense serious concern with
ultimate problems and human purposes and because (contrary
to what is often said on other occasions) it includes a sense
of human responsibility and sets a high premium on honesty
with oneself. This attitude, I think, is mistaken. Sartre’s whole
endeavor is to explain man’s predicament in human terms
wthout postulating an existent God to guarantee anything
Those who read him as reUgious are saying that one may' be
rehgious without any non-human absolute. This may be Lie
but Sartre says in effect that we must caU such a pLition aii
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xxxv
atheistic humanism. Kierkegaard would certainly have agreed
with him.^^
Sartre’s religious comments fall under two general head-
ings. First there are those passages- in which he specifically
attacks the traditional concepts of God and attempts to prove
them "false because self-contradictory. Second, throughout all
of Being and Nothingness there are religious overtones, the
use of traditional religious phraseology in contexts such that
evidently he' is attempting to bring into an human framework
phenomena frequently held to be religious.
The logical arguments focus on three problems; (1) Is the
idea of God as a Creator self-consistent and does this leave
any room for human freedom? (2) Is there an inconsistency
in the view of God as Causa SuVl (3) Can God exist outside
a totality?
In considering the concept of God as the Creator, Sartre
uses artistic creation as a parallel. The book which I write
emanates from me, but once created, it is in a sense no
longer mine. I can not control what use is made of it or what
people may think that it says to them. It may “say” something
which I never intended. So with the idea of God the Creator.
If the creature is still inwardly dependent on God, then he is
not separate, not free, not an independent existent. But if in
his inner being he is not dependent on God, then he no
longer can receive from God any justification for his existence
or any absoluteness. He does not “need” a Creator. Either
man is free and does not derive his meaning from God, or he
IS dependent on God and not free. For many reasons, some
of them already discussed, Sartre rejects the second alternative.
He rejects also two other positions closely connected with
the idea of God as Creator. One of these is Leibniz’ view of
freedom, according to which God has determined each
man’s essence and then left him to act freely in accordance
With the demands of his essence. Sartre’s reply here is to re-
has always seemed to me that T. S. EUot in The Cocktail Party is
a dramatization of these two choices. Clearly Celia has taken
to^ erkegaardian leap in faith. Lavinia and Edward would, according
my mteipretation, repr^ent the choice of atheistic existentialism as they
any idea that they might escape from themselves toward something
theii^r soberly assume responsibility for their lives. The triviality of
ves even after their awakening to the truth about themselves may
or ^ documentation of Sartre’s view of the absurdity of existence
Wastel^d ^ ^^^^‘^don of Eliot’s own view that life apart from God is a
xxxvi BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
iect the view that this is freedom. He argues that if God has
given us an essence, this is to determine all our future actions
by one original gesture. Thus by implication Sartre once rnore
rejects a Creator because of lus own fundamental position
on the For-itself’s total freedom. The other point he makes
as the result of an interview which he says that he had with
the Reverend Father Boisselot. (p. 689) Father Boisselot
made the statement that the Last Judgment is a kind of “clos-
ing of the account” effected by God, who determines when one
is to die, thus making one “finally be what one has been —
irremediably.” Sartre agrees that at the moment of dea^ one
becomes only his past and hence an in-itself; the meaning of
one’s life is henceforth to be determined and sustained only
as others are interested in interpreting it. But he denies that
one’s life is free if a God has been able to determine the end
of it. According to whether I die before or after completing a
great artistic work, or committing a great crime, the meaning
of my life will vary greatly. If God is to determine the time,
then I shall not have been responsible for making my life
what it will have been. Of course, if God does not determine
my death, the fact remains that unless I commit suicide, I do
not myself determine it. But this undetermined contingency
Sartre does not regard as a threat to freedom, rather just
one more example of the finitude within which I make myself.
The idea of God as a Self-cause has already been mentioned
in connection with our discussion of desire. A related but
slightly different argument is put in terms of necessity and
contingency. It runs as follows; If God causes himself, then
he must stand at a distance from himself. This makes God’s
self into something contingent; i.e., dependent But the
contmgent can not be God. Therefore there is no God. Or
starting from the other end, if God is not contingent, then
he does not exist, because existence is contingent
' Again we can not without contradiction look on God as
an intelligent being who both transcends and includes the
totahty.
God IS consciousness, he is integrated in the
totality. And if by his nature, he is a being beyond con-
sciousness (that IS, an in-itself which would be its own
foundation) still the totality can appear to him only as
ob^ct (m that case he lacks the totality’s internal disin-
gra ion as the subjective effort to reapprehend the self)
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
XXXVll
or as subject (then since God is not this subject, he can
only experience it without knowing it). Thus no point
of view on the totality is conceivable; the totality has no
‘outside,’ and the very question of the meaning of the
‘underside’ is stripped of meaning. We can not go
further.” (p. 400)
Finally all these concepts and Sartre’s objections to them
are seen to involve the principle that man as for-itself lives
with the constant ideal (projected in the form of God)
of achieving a synthesis of In-itself-For-itself. This is an
obviously self-contradictory ideal, for the essence of the For-
itself is the power to secrete a Nothingness, to be always in
' the process of becoming, to be-about-to-be. If it is to exist
fully, the For-itself must forever assert its lack of Being in
order that it may reveal Being, so that there may be Being.
For the For-itself to be one with the In-itself would necessi-
tate an identification of fullness, of Being, and Non-being — an
identification impossible because self-contradictory. The only
way by which the For-itself could become In-itself would
be to cease being For-itself, and this we have seen can
happen only in death. There are reminiscences of this irration-
al pursuit in the Freudian longing for the security of the
womb, in man’s nostalgic desire to regain the lost paradise of
oneness with nature, in the mystic’s desire to be absorbed in
the Absolute.
One may pick flaws in these arguments. For example one
might argue that Sartre is guilty of a petitio principii in
his assertion that Being is contingent, or that his example
of the work of art could by analogy be used to prove rather
than to disprove the case for a divine Creator. More impor-
tant, &e religious believer might well assert that God by
definition does not have to meet the tests of human logic.
Perhaps the more serious attack on religion lies not in these
arguments but in Sartre’s attempts to show how we can see
or so-called religious phenomena an explanation which would
aot need to go outside a non-supematural ontology. It might
e said that in so doing he is following the same line of ap-
^ employed by Freud when he tries to prove that
is a gigantic father image, a projection of the super-ego.
nus Sartre claims that our idea of the Creator is simply
n extrapolation from our recognition of ourselves as manip-
^ ors of the instrumental complexes of the world. As each
xxxviii
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
of us forms a center of reference for objects in the world
and uses them, so we think of God as a kind of master artisan
who stands both as an absolute center of reference and as the
original fabricator of tools. In the same way the concept ot
an omniscient Deity arises consequent to our search for an
absolute Third who would look at us without being in turn
looked-at. This need occurs in us, Sartre says, because our
only genuine sense of community comes in the form of an
Us-object when we perceive ourselves along with others form-
ing the object of the gaze of an Other. Our attempt to feel
ourselves one with all of mankind necessitates the presence of
a Third who looks at us aU collectively but upon whom no
outside gaze may be directed.
Interestingly enough, Sartre’s view of the relation between
the In-itself and the For-itself presents, as it seems to me, an
old theological problem in new dress, though Sartre in this
instance does not point up the connection. The For-itself,
as I have repeatedly said, is absolutely dependent on the In-
itself and is a mere abstraction without it. Yet the In-itself,
since it is a plenitude, has no need of the For-itself.
It is this lack of reciprocity which prevents our seeing in
Being a perfect synthesis of two moments. If one likes,
one may see here the old difficulty encountered by theology.
If God is perfect, full Being, why did he feel the need to
create men? Sartre is up against the same problem. If the
In-itself is absolute fullness, why should it ever, or how could
it ever have effected the “hole of Being” which we know
as consciousness? Like many Believers Sartre is forced to
accept this as an ultimate fact, if not a Mystery, and offers
only an “as-if” explanation. Everything has happened “as if”
Being in an effort to found itself had split and produced the
For-itself, which is the foundation of its own Nothingness
but not of its own Being,
In addition to the passages devoted to the discussion of
God, there are offered explanations of other concepts fre-
quently associated with religion. One of the most important
of these is Sartre s discussion of guilt. Here we may see a dis-
tinction between what I should like to call psychological guilt
and existential guilt. Psychological guilt, by which I mean
consciousness of doing the kind of wrong which can be avoid-
^ personally responsible, Sartre
^ J m the conduct of bad faith. It consists in not accepting
ones responsibilities as a For-itself, in seeking to blame soml
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
XXXK
one or something for what one has done freely oneself, in
choosing to assert one’s freedom only where it is expedient
and on other occasions to seek refuge in a theory of psycho-
logical determinism. It is to pretend that one is born with a
determined self instead of recognizing that one spends one’s
life pursuing and making oneself. It is the refusal to face the
anguish which accompanies the recognition of our absolute
freedom. Thus guilt is -a lack of authenticity, which comes
close to being the one new and absolute virtue in existen-
tialism.^®
But rather surprisingly in a non-theistic philosophy we
find also a concept of existential guilt, an inescapable guilt,
a species of Original Sin. “My original fall is the existence
of the Other.’’ (p. 352) Both my shame and my pride stem
from the fact that I have an “outside” or “nature,” a self
which exists for the Other and which I am unable to deter-
mine or even, to know. Thus although I can never, even
if I try, be an object to myself, I am made an object for
others. “It is before the Other that I am guilty. I am guilty
first when beneath the Other’s look I experience my alienation
and my nakedness as a fall from grace which I must assume.
This is the meaning of the famous line from Scripture: ‘They
knew that they were naked.’” (p. 531) Thus the For-itself,
which is to itself wholly subjectivity, feels itself to be guilty
because it is made an object by another. It is guilty because it
consents to this alienation and again guilty in that it will in-
evitably cause the Other to experience this same alienation. We
can not live without making objects and means of the Other,
thus transcending his transcendence, and this is to do violence
to his subjectivity. Fear before God, says Sartre, comes when
one tries to glorify this object-state by positing oneself as
only an object before an absolute subject, (p. 385) But for
Sa^e this would be an intensification of one’s psychological
guilt, for it amounts to" a false denial of one’s free subjectivity.
The reverse situation occurs when one without rejecting God’s
existence tries to make of him an absolute object by perform-
ing black masses, desecrating the Host, desiring evil for evil’s
(In tbis last instance, however, it must be noted
at this is to desire evil only in accordance with the conven-
tional definition of it)
written an exceUent article on this point. "Authen-
ExistenUal Virtue.” Ethics. Vol LXn, No. 4. July, 1952. pp.
xl ' BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
In many passages where there is no explicit reli^ous
association Sartre seems by his choice of words to indicate
such connection. There is for example his use of the Imce
“ekstases.” The term inevitably suggests mystic connotations.
Desan hints that the concept of three ekstases may be com-
pared to the Christian Trinity— although he never attempts to
carry out the comparison.^^ I do not myself see any possibility
of sustaining a direct comparison between Sartres^ three
ekstases and the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. But since in
each case the ekstasis is that standing apart from self which
was the mystic’s goal, it seems probable that here as fre-
quently Sartre is offering as part of his description of the hu-
man condition an experience which in a different context al-
together has been given a religious significance. Sartre’s three
ekstases are: (1) The ever renewed internal negation of the
In-itself by the For-itself. This involves the “diaspora” of
the three temporal ekstases. In the present the For-itself is
not anything. But it is present to the In-itself, In the light
of what the For-itself chooses to make of the past (by which
is meant that which the For-itself has been, an in-itself
from which it is now separated by a nothingness) the For-itself
thrusts itself toward the Future by choosing the Self
which it will be. (2) The reflection by which the For-itself
reflects on its original nihilation (a process known as pure
reflection) and on its psychic states (impure reflection). (3)
Being-for-others when the For-itself realizes that it has a Self
which exists for the Other and which it can never know.
Certmn other vaguely religious concepts are still more
briefly treated. Eternity, for instance, Sartre defines as the
ideal value which man is seeking and which “is not the
infinity of duration, of that vain pursuit after the self for
which I am rnyself responsible; man seeks a repose in self,
the atemporality of the absolute coincidence with himself.”
(p. 202) A sacred object is one which in the world
points to transcendence beyond the world, (p. 487) The
margin of unpredictability” offered by the unforeseen re-
sistance of the In-itself is related to the Greek habit of
erecting an altar to an unknown god. (pp. 650-51) A kind
of corporeal pantheism too receives its due in Sartre’s descrip-
tion of one way in which we may “exist our body.” If a per-
son chooses to identify himself with the body and its pleasures
to the fullest extent possible, this may be interpreted as one
” Desan, the Tragic Finale, p. 73.
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xli
method by which the For-itself “makes the in-itself exist.”
‘In this case the desired synthesis of the in-itself with the
for-itself will be the quasi-pantheistic synthesis of .the totality
of the in-itself with the for-itself which recovers it. Here the
body is the instrument of the synthesis; it loses itself in fa-
tigue, for example, in order that this in-itself may exist to
the fullest” (p. 588)
To such passages may be added others in which the mere
language suggests that old terms are being deliberately worked
into a new framework. Thus the process by which the For-
itself faces up to its true being, a process which Sartre tells
us is necessary before one can lead an ethical life, is called
a katharsis or purification. External objects or beings are
“revealed as co-present in a world where the For-itself unites
them with its own blood by that total ekstatic sacrifice of
the self which is called presence.” (p. 177) Even the proof
of the transcendence, the transphenomenality of Being, is
termed an ontological proof. It is as though Sartre were at-
tempting to use a new theological argument to prove the ex-
istence of absolute, unjustified, unconscious mass.
Sartre’s summary of his religious position is brief and to
the point “Everything happens as if the world, man, and
man-in-the-world succeeded in re alizin g only a missing God.”
(p. 191 ) The question has sometimes been raised as to just
why since Sartre’s whole interpretation of existence postulates
the pursuit of God, he is not willin g to go one step further
and postulate a God who exists. Or if this is asking too
much (and actually I think it would in effect overthrow the
whole work) then why does he not accept the concept as a
valuable myth with inspirational power? While Sartre has
never in so many words posed this question and answered
clear what his reply would be. He re-
] the notion that God actually exists because the idea
spp^rs to him false on logical grounds. He refuses the myth
renrh ^ stem conviction that we must face
and not hide behind myths which would tend to blur
cauQP human dilemma. He refuses it also be-
belipf ^ believes, inevitably accompanied by a
Would ^ f solutes and a theory of a human nature which
Ibat ennif , destiny, because it conceals the fact
tfeere discover and afiBrm his own values, that
one r.f V? guarantee the permanent validity of any
set of Ideals as compared with another.
xHi BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
The fact that ultimately Sartre’s rejection of God is based
on rational arguments (whether or not his critics arc persuaded
of their cogency) is extremely significant in view of the fact
that existentialism is generally regarded as an example of con-
temporary irrationalism. If we examine Sartre’s position care-
fully, we find that it emphasizes both reason and unreason
and in a manner precisely the reverse of what we find in the
writings of either the Scholastics or the Nco-Platonists. In the
religious writers we are familiar with the idea that man pro-
ceeds within the human sphere by relying on reason, that he
may use reason in his initial approach to God, but that the
final vision and, paradoxically, the ultimate source of true
wisdom is non-rational. All this Sartre completely reverses.
When consciousness first chooses its way of Being, this is a
non-rational, actually a prc-rational choice. The For-itsclf may
choose to live rationally, to live by emotion, to deny the va-
lidity of logic, to honor only scientific “objectivity," to refuse
to confine itself within any one attitude — the possibilities are
many and varied But it is clear that Sartre feels that the
rational choice is the best one. This was already evident in his
treatment of the emotions. The emotional relation, which is
a purely personal relation set up by the For-itsclf between
it and the In-itself, is inadequate because it is ineffective;
it can not (at least not directly) affect the environment and
produce lasting results. This is because it is essentially a denial
of the instrumental complexes of the world; it refuses to admit
the external resistance, what Sartre (after Bachclard) calls
the “coefficient of adversity” of tire In-itself, Reason, on the
other hand, always takes this organized world into considera-
tion, for by definition knowledge is the one real bridge
between the For-itself and the In-itself. If we may say
that reason is consciousness’ perception of those organizations
and relations which the brute universe is capable of sustaining
and that it is the perception of relations established in human
products (language, etc.) such that any human being may
recognize them, that it is also the will to confine oneself
within these limits, then certainly in the final analysis Sartre’s
philosophy is a philosophy of reason. It includes tlie irrational
among its data and recognizes that man’s irrational behavior
IS an important part of him. But the final appeal, the standard
o (judgment, is reason. It is true that Sartre regards the uni-
verse as being fundamentally without purpose and without
any rational organization save what man puts into it. But this
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xliii
is merely to assert that reason is human in origin. Bad faith is
essentially irrational because it asserts two mutually contra-
dictory principles, that one is free and that one is not free,
i Thus contrary to the Scholastic who would have man start
i with reason but ultimately gain salvation by departing from
reason (even if this means to go “beyond reason”), the ex-
istentialist hero recognizes the irrational nature of his initial
choice but saves himself by a rational acceptance of the
hard facts of his condition.
I Hitherto we have for the most part kept ourselves within
the confines of ontology. And this is proper since Sartre has
t subtitled his book “A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology.”
i Mistakes are often made by those who would treat the work
j as a metaphysics. Sartre states clearly his distinction between
I the two: Ontology studies “the structures of being of the
' existent taken as a totality”; it describes the conditions under
I v^hich there may be a world, human reality, etc. It answers
I the questions “How?” or “What?” and is description rather
than explanation. iFor this reason it can state positively.
Metaphysics, on the other hand, is concerned with origins and
seeks to explain why there is this particular world. But since
such explanations seek to go behind the Being which they
I must presuppose, they can be only hypotheses. Sartre does
) not disapprove of metaphysical attempts, but he noticeably
refrains from engaging in them. Yet he does erect an edifice
' of his own on the foundation of his ontology, and this is
, his unique -brand of psychology — existential psychoanalysis.
* While this does not offer hypotheses to explain the origin
. of the world of consciousness, it does nevertheless offer
I hypotheses for interpreting concrete examples of human be-
I havior and principles by which to understand individual
f personalities. Sartre even speaks longingly of the need for an
I existentialist Freud, who presumably might use this psy-
I choanalysis as the basis for a new therapy.
I - While still deeply indebted to Freud, Sartre has effected a
sharper break with the Freudian tradition than any other
contemporary psychologist. This break is in every instance
hnked with his peculiar concept of a free, translucent con-
sciousness, a position which leads him to reject all notions
of an unconscious ' (with Id, Superego, and Ego) as well as
idea of psychological determinism functioning in terms
0 a basic libido, will to power, universal Oedipus complex,
xliv BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
and the like, all of which Sartre regards as secondary struc-
tures. Since Sartre has himself so clearly outlined both simi-
larities and points of disagreement between himself and the
followers of Freud, Jung, and Adler, there is no need for
me to take up the matter here. I should like, however, to
comment on one problem presented by Sartre s view and then
to mention briefly some consequences of this new psychology.
The most important problem, I think, concerns the ques-
tion as to just what within Sartre’s psychology we are to make
of the personality. We are told that through the new psy-
choanalysis we reach the person; that is, we discover the
original choice of a mode of Being by which the For-itself
has related itself to the world. But wherein does this person
consist? It seems that it must be the Ego and not conscious-
ness, for the latter is non-personal. Yet since it is conscious-
ness (not the Ego) which makes the original choice and — as
the For-itself realizes in anguish — may at any moment replace
this first choice of Being by a different one, it seems that we
have not found the person unless we have reached the pre-
reflective consciousness. But how can we have an impersonal
person? Possibly this is quibbling. Perhaps Sartre means that
we are to learn about the choice made by the original con-
sciousness and that obviously we are informed by observation
of the Ego. This would seem to be the case, particularly since
we can not at any event get inside another’s subjectivity.
We may also ask about the nature of the unity of this
personality. In rejecting the idea of an unconscious, Sartre not
only insists that there are only conscious acts but claims that
the For-itself always acts as a whole and hence is a unity. But
it is a strange sort of unity since the For-itself is never united
with its self but always separated from it in the various
ekstases. Actually the problem may not be as difficult and
insoluble as it first appears. Sartre is, of course, not the first
philosopher to deny the existence of a Self-substance. When
he speaks of our pursuit of a self, he means that we can not
say that a particular For-itself is something any more than we
can say that at any given instant the flying arrow is at the
point C on the designated route A-Z. The nature of the For-
itself is rather such that it is continually choosing to project
Itself toward future possibilities. In this sense it is never united
with a self because it is process rather than entity. But we need
not take the point of view of certain critics who argue that
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
xlv
Sartre is here inconsistent in that he describes the For-itself as
self-less and then treats it as an individualized being.
Desan, for example, discusses Sartre’s “repudiation of
the Ego” (which in itself is an inaccurate representation) so
as to try to show that Sartre needs an Ego-less For-itself for
ontology, but a personal For-itself for psychology, for ethics,
and for relations with others; and he claims that Sartre alter-
nates between the two concepts. All of Desan’s arguments are
based on the assumption that Sartre in stating that the Ego
is not identical with the original consciousness has taken away
any reality of being from the For-itself and has given up aU
right to employ the words “I” or “Me.” But this is a miscon-
ception. In the first place Sartre has not repudiated the Ego;
he has only made of it an object of the pre-reflective con-
sciousness rather than contemporary with it But it exists just
as much as objects in the world exist. Also Sartre never denies
the existence of an active, organizing (constituante) , indi-
vidual consciousness any more than does William James, who
likewise rejected consciousness as an entity. He merely insists
that it is essentially a Nothingness which is individualized by its
objects but never wholly determined by past objects to an ex-
tent which would prescribe what it will do with present or
future ones. Consciousness can never blot out the fact that it
has been aware of certain objects (part of which it has unified
within the ideal unity of the Ego) ; at times it may even let
itself be trapped by the Ego and not actively realize its ability
to change its point of view on past objects. But the possibility
IS there. When Sartre speaks of- inter-subjective relations, of
the phenomenon of bad faith, etc., he is referring to the
fr^ consciousness which has been directed toward certain
objects, which usually asserts itself consistently with the
general “character” of the Ego, but which is not forced to
do so. In ordinary experience consciousness for all practical
purposes fully asserts itself through the “I,” but anguish
occasionally warns us that this familiar “I” is only a screen.
Nevertheless consciousnesses are particular since they appear
et a definite time and place, thus nihilating Being from a
particular point of view. Sartre has warned us, as we said
oarlier, that strictly speaking one should not say “my con-
^ousness” but “consciousness of me.” But if I say “con-
' ousness of me” and if you say “consciousness of me,” our
^ usciousnesses are as distinct as the Egos of which they
^0 conscious.
xivi . BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
What then becomes of the unity of the personality in
this conception? Consciousness acts as a unity, and since
either directly or indirectly through the Ego consciousness
chooses its wa) of being, in every external or psychic act — in
this sense personality is one. But in so far as consciousness
may focus on various aspects of the psychic ego, there may
result phenomena which look like those of the split personal-
ity. In the same way what seems to be an inconsistent act
or a sudden “conversion” may be due to the fact that con-
sciousness has chosen to act in accordance with a usually
ignored part of its psychic past or that it has totally tran-
scended the Ego and made a new choice of being.*^^i he “latter
is a rare event, but biographies and novels as well as the lit-
erature of the mystics attest to its occurrence.
It would be interesting to ask what — if we follow Sartre’s
view — ^would become of the old Socratic dictum that if a
man knows the good, he will necessarily choose it. In one
passage Sartre seems to restate Socrates’ belief almost ver-
batim. In his discussion of evil he points out that the For-
itself is not evil any more than it is good (or anything else).
For if it were to be evil, it would be an in-itself. The For-
itself, as Sartre is ever reiterating, is its being only in the
mode of “having to be” or of “choosing to be.” Now among
other possibilities from which it chooses, it may choose to be
good. It can not, however, choose to be evil!
“If I were to be evil for myself, I should of necessity be
so in the mode of having to be so and would have to
apprehend myself and will myself as evil. But this would
mean that I must discover myself as willing what appears
to myself as the opposite of my Good and precisely be-
cause it is Evil or the opposite of my Good. It is there-
fore expressly necessary that I will the contrary of what I
desire at one and the same moment and in the same
relation; that is, I would have to hate myself precisely as
I am myself. ... I would" have to approve myself by the
same act which makes me blame myself.” (pp. 365 - 66 )
All of this is impossible because since I am my own nothing-
ness, I can never gain the necessary objectivity with regard to
myself. Yet if one can not knowingly choose evil, one can be
j which somewhat unexpectedly
Sartre defines as the love of failure. How is this possible? The
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xlvii
answer seems to lie in concluding that an individual For-itself
may not consider Bad Faith and love of failure to be evils.
It is only from Sartre’s point of view (and ours if we follow
him) that a person may fail to choose the good, and this is
because he does not know what we call evil to be evil.
On three other aspects of Sartre’s psychology I should
like to comment briefly. The first relates to his views on the
subjective and the objective as related to the analysis of human
character. As pointed out earlier, consciousness can not take
a point of view on itself as a totality. Strictly speaking, any
human fact is a subjective fact since any observation of the
world is a human — ^subjective — observation. But at the s^e
time while Sartre denies that consciousness can make an
object out of- itself, his position allows us to see why the
For-itself can take just as legitimate (and no more so) an
objective point of view on certain of its own states as it can
on the states of anyone else or as anyone else can with re-
spect to it. If Pierre and Paul are both considering Pierre’s
love for a certain woman, they are both considering an ob-
jective state. For while the immediate impulse is a love-con-
sciousness which Pierre is, the state of love is part of Pierre’s
object-ego (or at least his psyche). Both he and Paul may
view it as an object. Each judges it in terms of the other ob-
jects of which his consciousness is and has been aware. Thus
a person may under certain circumstances undertake his own
psychoanalysis. He stands before his psyche not in any privi-
leged position but exactly as does the psychiatrist. The rela-
tively higher or lower chances of his success will depend on
the practical wisdom which he can bring to bear in his evalua-
tions of his own psychic being. At the same time neither he
nor the psyc^atrist can analyze the pre-reflective conscious-
ness, the patient because he is this consciousness, the analyst
scause he can know it only as object whereas its being is
pwe subjectivity. Both patient and analyst must attempt to -
judp the acts of his consciousness through its effects as re-
veled in the outside world and in the Ego.
psychological positions, original, I believe, with
6, are of particular importance in connection with his
For-itselfs relation with other people— the
anH These are his ideas about the nature of the body
^ sense, of course, the body repre-
minpe iiis Being-there in the world. It deter-
certain physical limits to what the For-itself can do
Xlviii BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
within or to the world. And if we speak of its actual chemical
make-up, we are considering part of that Being with which the
For-itself as Nothingness is forever contrasted. Yet except
when it becomes a corpse the body does not actually belong
within the province of the In-itself. As “existed” by the For-
itself it is a psychic object; in fact we might more accurately
say that the For-itself is its body. Without a body the For-itself
could have no relation whatsoever with what we call the
world. For the For-itself is consciousness of objects as seen,
felt, etc., in other words, as perceived through the senses. Tlie
For-itself does not have senses. It is present to the world
through the senses, and the world spatially has meaning only
with the body as a center of reference. As a For-itself, al-
though I can adopt the point of view of an Other by holding
up a hand or foot and looking at it, I experience my body
as mine only when I experience the world through it. In
this case I do not view my body as an instrument which I
use as in the old soul-body dualism, but I am this instrument
toward which the instruments of the world are pointing and
by which the world is revealed as a hierarchy of instrumen-
tal complexes. If the For-itself w'ere not body simultaneously
with consciousness, the idea of objects as instruments would
not make sense. I know my own body not as a piece of
In-itself with which I am burdened but as Being-for-itself.
“Thus to say that I have entered into the world, come to the
world, or that there is a world, or that I have a body is one
and the same thing.” (p. 419)
In tliis capacity the body serves as a necessary link by
which Sartre sets up a cogito of the Other’s existence. We saw
that in "La Transcendence de I’Ego” Sartre believed that by
making the Ego a part of the psychic and hence an object
in the world, he could refute solipsism. In Being and
Nothingness he states that in the earlier article he had been
too optimistic.
“Even if outside the empirical Ego there is nothing other
than the consciousness of that Ego — ^tliat is, a tran-
scendental field without a subject — the fact remains that
my affirmation of the Other demands and requires the
existence beyond the world of a similar transcendental
field. Consequently the only way to escape solipsism
would be here^ again to prove that my transcendental
consciousness is in its very being affected by extra-
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION xlix
mundane existence of other consciousnesses of the same
type.” (p. 318)
As far as reasons and proof are concerned, Sartre is convinced
that we can never prove the Other’s existence. This is because
the Other is by definition a For-itself outside my experience
and proof must be based on what is within my experience.
But while we do hot prove the Other’s existence, we encoun-
tk him as a “factual necessity”; our doubt of his existence is
only the -abstract doubt which we might equally well apply
to our own existence, and it is not persuasive. By a kind of
ontologtcal proof Sartre had shown the necessity for acknowl-
edging the existence of the In-itself. The existence of the
Other is hot an ontological necessity, for we could imagine, if
need, be, .a world where there were no others, tp. 339) But
the Other’s existence is a “contingent necessity.” We do not
encounter reasons for believing in the Other’s existence, but
we encounter the Other and would offer as much natural
r^istance to solipsism as we would offer to doubts of our own
•existence. This means that while I can not prove the fact
^ that the very being of my consciousness is affected by another
consciousness, I do in fact experience it.
- The connecting link here is the body. When I “exist”
my body in the process of achieving my usual relations with
- objects in the world, this is my “body-for-me.” But the body
has two other dimensions as well. There is the body-for-the-
Other and “the body-seen-by-the-Other.” When I behold
the Other’s body, I can interpret its movements only by
assuming that it is directed by a For-itself, in short by recog-
nizing its psychic quality. But this means that the spati.il
and- instrumental organization of the world which I had
effected with my own body as a center of reference is no
longer the only possible arrangement. Instead there appears
a grouping of objects around the Other as center; he has
caused an “internal haemorrhage of my world which bleeds in
^ direction.” He has stolen my world away from me. Still
urther development occurs when I experience my body-seen-
y-the-Other. In this case I suddenly realize that I exist as an
0 for the Other, that I possess a self which he knows
and which I can never know, and that I am vulnerable to the
ther, who may anticipate and block my possibilities for
ac ion. Thus the revelation of the Other is the Look. I
experience him as subject when he looks at me and as object
1 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
when I look at him. And upon this unstable shifting of sub-
ject and object is erected the whole edifice of Sartrian love,
hate, sadism, masochism, and even indifference, all of which
together constitute that conflict which is at the basis of all
inter-human relationships.
While the body is that through which the Look is ex-
perienced, it is sexuality which just as much as in Freudian
psychology — though in a far different way — ^lies at the origin
of all human relations. Like Freud, Sartre believes that the
mature sex impulse is the result of a long development but
that sexuality exists even in the very young child. He is, how-
ever, entirely original so far as I know when he writes, “Man,
it is said, is a sexual being because he possesses a sex. And if
the reverse were true? If sex were only the instrument, and,
so to speak, the image of a fundamental sexuality? If man
possessed a sex only because he is orginally and funda-
mentally a sexual being as a being who exists in the world in
relation with other men?” (p. '499) This amazing statement
he explains by an analysis of sexual desire. Pointing out first
that desire is evidently not necessarily found exclusively when
accompanied by the presence of fully developed sex organs,
he says that sexual desire is not merely or primarily the desire
of physical “satisfaction.” It is rather the deep-seated impulse
of the For-itself to capture the Other’s subjectivity. It tries to
achieve this goal by, so to speak, “incarnating” its own con-
sciousness, letting itself feel itself almost wholly flesh and so
inducing the Other to do the same. But this appeal of the
flesh to the flesh ultimately fails, not only because satiated
desire ceases to be desire, but because in physical possession
the lover still knows only his own pleasure and the body of
the Other. The Other’s subjectivity can become a part^of my
experience only in two ways — either as I know myself to be
the object of it or as I look upon it as an object; but in neither
case do I as subject know him as subject. The reason why I
want to get hold of his subjectivity is, of course, to protect
myself against the possibility of his making an object of me.
The fact that both lover and beloved feel this same need ac-
counts for the instability and ultimate failure of love.
- _ I ana purposely avoiding discussion of the fuller implica-
tions of the ethical and social problems touched on in Being
and Nothingness. This is not because I feel that Sartre has
notmng of importance to say on the subject or because I agree
with those who claim, that for the For-itself, as Sartre has
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
li
portrayed it, no personal or social ethics is possible. It is
simply that I believe it unwise to discuss a subject which
Sartre himself has told us he is waiting to develop in another
work. In the light ofNnumerous statements to the effect that
man is a useless passion and that life is absurd, and in view
of Sartre’s attempt to show that all of the familiar attitudes
toward the Other— love, hate, masochism, sadism, and
indifference — ^result in failure, it is no wonder that critics
have been sceptical as to the possibility of future positive
development Yet it is important to note that Francis Jeanson,
in a book prefaced by a letter of-approval from Sartre himself,
offers the idea that Sartre has described these concrete human
projects as they generally are, rather than as they have to be.
On the level on which the “spirit of seriousness” chooses to
live, life is absurd, but the absurdity consists precisely in
maintaining life at this level. If consciousness will practice
a “purifying reflection,” it may find possibilities for a new set
of ethical values consistent with its total freedom and un-
limited self-responsibility.
In the absence of more information about this “purifying
reflection” we are limited to observation of what Sartre has
done in applying his philosophical conclusions in literary
analyses. There is at least the foundation for a social ethics in
an article which came out in 1946 called “Materialisme et
Revolution” {Les Temps Modernes). Here in his portrayal
of the New Revolutionary, Sartre lays down a plan for a
society which would allow for continual self-transcendence
in the direction of greater freedom. As yet the nearest ap-
proach to an existentialist hero who would represent an ideal
of personal ethics seems to be Orestes in The Flies. In this
play, which is quite obviously an attack on the “spirit of
seriousness” and conventional religious views, Orestes refuses
0 join with the people in their feeling of general guilt and need
or atonement induced by the sin of Clytemnestra and Aegis-
, and Eve?). He will not be awed by a display of
? of the Universe (the Voice out of the Whirl-
''^md. ). He insists that he became free from his Creator at the
foment of creation, and he claims that he is not in the Uni-
erse to carry out any prescribed orders laid down by a god.
u what does he offer in return? He insists on accepting full
sponsibility for each of his acts. He gives up the role of
eanson, Le probleme moral et la pensS de Sartre. Especially p. 276.
lii
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
spectator and voluntarily commits his freedom to the cause
of the people of Argos. He is willing to give up his peace
of mind for the sake of the suffering. He sets out alone to
find new paths of action appropriate for man who can no
longer discover his destiny by viewing himself as a part of
Nature’s plan. In short he accepts the tension of absolute
freedom and total responsibility. In the play Orestes does
not seem to know quite what course he will follow once
he has left Argos, but we can feel sure that he will set a high
premium on rational facing up to the facts of the human
condition as he sees them and will work out principles of
conduct consistent with his earlier pronouncements. I suspect
that at the present moment this is about as far as we are
justified in going in making any prediction as to the nature
of the ethical discussion which Sartre has promised us.
Hazel E. Barnes
University of Colorado
INTRODUCTION
The Pursuit of Being
INTRODUCTION
Tlie Pursuit of Being
I. THE PHENOMENON
Modern thought has realized considerable progress by re-
ducing the existent to the series of appearances which man-
ifest it Its aim was to overcome a certain number of dualisms
which have embarrassed philosophy and to replace them by
the monism of the phenomenon. Has the attempt been
successful?
In the first place we certainly thus get rid of that dualism
which in the existent opposes interior to exterior. There is no
longer an exterior for the existent if one means by that a
superficial covering which hides from sight the true nature
of the object. And this true nature in turn, if it is to be the
secret reality of the thing, which one can have a presentiment
of or which one can suppose but can never reach because
it is the “interior” of the object under consideration —
this -nature no longer exists. The appearances which manifest
the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all
^ual, they all refer to other appearances, and none of them
is privileged. Force, for example, is not a metaphysical conatus
of an unknown kind which hides behind its effects (accelera-
tions, deviations, etc.); it is the totality of these effects.
Similarly an electric current does not have a secret reverse
side; it is nothing but the totality of the physical-chemical
actions which manifest it (electrolysis, the incandescence of
3
4 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
a carbon filament, the displacement of the needle of a gal-
vanometer, Btc.'). No one of these actions alone is sufficient to
reveal it. But no action indicates anything which is behind
itself; it indicates only itself and the total series.
The obvious conclusion is that the dualism of being and
appearance is no longer entitled to any legal status within
philosophy. The appearance refers to the total series of appear-
ances and not to a hidden reality which would drain to itself
all the being of the existent. And the appearance for its part
is not an inconsistent manifestation of this being. To the ex-
tent that men had believed in noumenal realities, they have
presented appearance as a pure negative. It was “that which is
not being”; it had no other being than that of illusion and
error. But even this being was borrowed, it was itself a pre-
tense, and philosophers met with the greatest difficulty in
maintaining cohesion and existence in the appearance so that
it should not itself be reabsorbed in the depth of non-
phenomenal being. But if we once get away from what
Nietzsche called “the illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene,”
and if we no longer believe in the being-behind-the-appear-
ance, then the appearance becomes full positivity; its essence
is an “appearing” which is no longer opposed to being but on
the contrary is the measure of it. For the being of an existent
is exactly what it appears. Thus we arrive at the idea of the
phenomenon such as we can find, for example, in the “phe-
nomenology” of Husserl or of Heidegger — ^the phenomenon
or the relative-absolute. Relative the phenomenon remains,
for “to appear” supposes in essence somebody to whom to ap-
pear. But it does not have the double relativity of Kant’s iS'r-
scheinung. It does not point over its shoulder to a true being
which would be, for it, absolute. What it is, it is absolutely,
for it reveals itself as it is. The phenomenon can be studied
and described as such, for it is absolutely indicative of itself.
The duality of potency^ and act falls by the same stroke.
The act is everything. Behind the act there is neither potency
nor “hexis’’’^ nor virtue. We shall refuse, for example, to
understand by “genius” — ^in the sense in which we say that
Proust “had genius” or that he “was” a genius — a particular
capacity^ to produce certain works, which was not exhausted
exactly in producing them. The genius of Proust is neither
the work considered in isolation nor the subjective ability to
isaoxei the rough breathing
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
5
produce it; it is the work considered as the totality of the
manifestations of the person.
That is why we can equally well reject the dualism of
appearance and essence. The appearance does not hide the
essence, it reveals it; it is the essence. The essence of an
existent is no longer a property sunk in the cavity of this
existent; it is the manifest law which presides over the suc-
cession of its appearances, it is the principle of the series. To
the nominalism of Poincare, defining a physical reality (an
electric current, for example) as the sum of its various mani-
festations, Duhem rightly opposed his own theory, which
makes of the concept the synthetic unity of these manifesta-
tions. To be sure phenomenology is anything but a nom-
inalism. But essence, as the principle of the series, is definite-
ly only the concatenation of appearances; that is, itself an
appearance. This explains how it is possible to have an in-
tuition of essences (the Wesenschau of Husserl, for example) .
The phenomenal being manifests itself; it manifests its essence
as wen as its existence, and it is nothing but the well con-
nected series of its manifestations.
Does this mean that by reducing the existent to its man-
ifestations we have succeeded in overcoming all dualisms? It
seems rather that we have converted them all into a new
dualism: that of finite and infinite. Yet the existent in fact
can not be reduced to a finite series of manifestations since
each one of them is a relation to a subject constantly chang-
ing. Although an object may disclose itself only through a
single Abschattung, the sole fact of there being a subject
implies the possibility of multiplying the points of view on
that Abschattung. This sufiBces to multiply to infinity the
Abschattung under consideration. Furthermore if the series
of appearances were finite, that would mean that the first
appearances do not have the possibility of reappearing, which
is absurd, or that they can be all given at once, which is still
more absurd. Let us understand indeed that our theory of the
phenomenon has replaced the reality of the thing by the
objectivity of the phenomenon and that it has based this on
an appeal to infinity. The reality of that cup is that it is
there and that it is not me. We shall interpret this by saying
that the series of its appearances is bound by a principle
which does not depend on my whim. But the appearance,
reduced to itself and without reference to the series of which
^t is a part, could be only an intuitive and subjective pleni-
6 BEING. AND NOTHINGNESS
tude, the manner in which the subject is affected. If the
phenomenon is to reveal itself as transcendent, it is necessary
that the subject himself transcend the appearance toward the
total series of which it is a member. He must seize Red
through his impression of red. By Red is meant the principle
of the series— the electric current through the electrolysis,
etc. But if the transcendence of the object is based on the
necessity of causing the appearance to be always transcended,
the result is that on principle an object posits the series of its
appearances as infinite. Thus the appearance, which is finite,
indicates itself in its finitude, but at the same time in order
to be grasped as an appearance-of-that-which-appears, it re-
quires that it be surpassed toward infinity.
This new opposition, the “finite and the infinite,” or
better, “the inWte in the finite,” replaces the dualism of
being, and appearance. What appears in fact is only an aspect
of the object, and the object is altogether in that aspect and
altogether outside of it It is altogether within, in that it
manifests itself in that aspect; it shows itself as the structure
of the appearance, which is at the same time the principle of
the series. It is altogether outside, for the series itself will
never appear nor can it appear. Thus the outside is opposed in
a new way to the inside, and the being-which-does-not-
appear, to the appearance. Similarly a certain “potency” re-
turns to inhabit the phenomenon and confer on it its very
transcendence — a potency to be developed in a series of re^
or possible appearances. The genius of Proust, even when
reduced to the works produced, is no less equivalent to the
infinity of possible points of view which one can take on
that work and which we will call the “inexhaustibility” of
Proust’s work. But is not this inexhaustibility which implies
a transcendence and a reference to the infinite — is this not
an “hexis” at the exact moment when one apprehends it on
the object? The essence finally is radically severed from the
individual appearance which manifests it, since on principle
it is that which must be able to be manifested by an infinite
series of individual manifestations.
In thus replacing a variety of oppositions by a single
dualism on which they all are based, have we gained or lost?
This we shall soon see. For the moment, the first consequence
of the “theory of the phenomenon” is that the appearance does
not refer to being as Kant’s phenomenon refers to the nou-
menon. mce there is nothing behind the appearance,- and
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
7
since it indicates only itself (and the total series of appear^
ances), it can not be supported by any being other than its
own. The appearance can not be Ae thin film of nothingness
which separates the being-of-the-subject from absolute-being.
If the essence of the appearance is an “appearing” which is
no longer opposed to any being, there arises a legitimate
problem concerning the being of this appearing. It is this
problem which, will be our first concern and which will be
the point of departure for our inquiry into being and nothing-
ness.
H. THE PHENOMENON OF BEING AND
THE BEING OF THE PHENOMENON
The appearance is not supported by any existent different
froih itself; it has its own being. The first being which we
meet in our ontological inquiry is the being of the appear-
ance. Is it itself an appearance? It seems so at first The
phenomenon is what manifests itself, and being manifests
itself to aH in some way, since we can speak of it and since
we have a certain comprehension of it. Thus there must be
for it a phenomenon of being, an appearance of being, capable
of description as such. Being will be disclosed to us by some
hind of immediate access — ^boredom, nausea, etc., and on-
tology will be the description of the phenomenon of being as
it, manifests itself; that is, without intermediary. However
for any ontology we should raise a preliminary question: is
^e phenomenon of being- thus achieved identical with the be-
mg of phenomena? In other words, is the being which discloses
Itself to me, which appears to me, of the same nature as the
bemg of existents which appear to me? It seems that there is
oo difficulty. Husserl has shown how an eidetic reduction is
always possible; that is, how one can always pass beyond the
concrete phenomenon toward its essence. For Heidegger also
human realit}^” is ontic-ontologicai; that is, it can always
pass beyond the phenomenon toward its being. But the pas-
sage from the particular object to the essence is a passage
from homogeneous to homogeneous. Is it the same for the
passage from the existent to the phenomenon of being: Is
passing beyond the existent toward the phenomenon of being
actually to pass beyond it toward its being, as one passes be-
8 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
yond the particular red toward its essence? Let us consider
further.
In a particular object one can always distinguish qualities
like color, odor, etc. And proceeding from these, one can
always determine an essence which they imply, as a sign im-
plies its meaning. The totality “object-essence” makes an
organized whole. The essence is not in the object; it is the
meaning of the object, the principle of the series of appear-
ances which disclose it. But being is neither one of the object’s
qualities, capable of being apprehended among others, nor a
meaning of the object. The object does not refer to being as to
a signification; it would be impossible, for example, to define
being as a presence since absence too discloses being, since
not to be there means still to be. The object does not possess
being, and its existence is not a participation in being, nor
any other kind of relation. It is. That is the only way to define
its manner of being; the object does not hide being, but
neither does it reveal being. The object does not hide it, for
it would be futile to try to push aside certain qualities of the
existent in order to find the being behind them; being is being
of them all equally. The object does not reveal being, for it
would be futile to address oneself to the object in order
to apprehend its being. The existent is a phenomenon; this
means that it designates itself as an organized totality of quali-
ties. It designates itself and not its being. Being is simply the
condition of all revelation. It is being-for-revealing (etre-poiir-
devoiler) and not revealed being (etre devoile). What then is
the meaning of the surpassing toward the ontological, of which
Heidegger speaks? Certainly I can pass beyond this table or
this chair toward its being and raise the question of the being-
of-the-table or the being-of-the-chair.= But at that moment I
turn my eyes away from the phenomenon of the table in order
to concentrate on the phenomenon of being, which is no
longer the condition of all revelation, but which is itself
something revealed — an appearance which, as such, needs in
turn a being on the basis of which it can reveal itself.
If the being of phenomena is not resolved in a phe-
nomenon of being and if nevertheless we can not say any-
thing about being without considering this phenomenon of
being, then the exact relation which unites the phenomenon
'Tr. Perhaps a more intelligible paraphrase would be, “the question of
what It means to be a table or a chair.”
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
9
of being to the being of the phenomenon must be established
trst of all. We can do this more easily if we will consider
that the whole of the preceding remarks has been directly
inspired by the revealing intuition of the phenomenon of
being. By not considering being as the condition of revelation
but rather being as an appearance which can be determined
in concepts, we have understood first of all fiiat knowledge
can not by itself give an account of being; that is, the being
of the phenomenon can not be reduced to the phenomenon of
being. In a word, the phenomenon of being is “ontological”
in the sense that we speak of the ontological proof of St.
Anselm and Descartes. It is an appeal to being; it requires,
as phenomenon, a foundation which is transphenomenal. The
phenomenon of being requires the transphenomenality of
being. That does not mean that being is found hidden behind
phenomena (we have seen that the phenomenon can not hide
being), nor that the phenomenon is an appearance which
refers to a distinct being (the phenomenon exists only qua
appearance; that is, it indicates itself on the foundation of
being). What is implied by the preceding considerations is
that the being of the phenomenon, although coextensive with
the phenomenon, can not be subject to the phenomenal con-
dition — ^which is to exist only in so far as it reveals itself — ^and
that consequently' it surpasses the knowledge which we have
of It and provides the basis for such knowledge.
ni. THE PRE-REFLECTIVE COGITO AND
the being of the PERCIPERE
0:^ will perhaps be tempted to reply that the difficulties
tn ° ail pertain to a certain conception of being,
^ realism entirely incompatible with
of tti motion of appearance. What determines the being
bavp t is the fact that it appears. And since we
icted reality to the phenomenon, we can say of the
to ifc appears. Why not push the idea
apoearina? >??? appearance is its
cloihA fif' j , ^ simply a way of choosing new words to
ta “f Berkeley. And it is in
after at Husserl and his followers are doing when,
heat the sheeted the phenomenological reduction, they
noema as unreal and declare that its esse is percipi.
10 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
It seems that the famous formula of Berkeley can not satis-
fy — for two essential reasons, one concerning the nature of
the percipi, the other that of the percipere.
The nature of the percipere.
If every metaphysics in fact presupposes a theory of
knowledge, every theory of knowledge in turn presupposes a
metaphysics. This means among other things that an idealism
intent on reducing being to the knowledge which we have
of it, ought first to give some kind of guarantee for the
being of knowledge. If one begins, on the other hand, by
taking the knowledge as a given, without being concerned to
establish a basis for its being, and if one then affirms that
esse est percipi, the totality “perceived-perception” lacks the
support of a solid being and so falls away in nothingness.
Thus the being of knowledge can not be measured by knowl-
edge; it not subject to the percipi,^ Therefore the founda-
tion-of-being (Vetre-fondement} for the percipere and the
percipi can not itself be subject to the percipi; it must be
transphenomenal. Let us return now to our point of departure.
We can always agree that the percipi refers to a being not
subject to the laws of the appearance, but we still maintain
that this transphenomenal being is the being of the subject
Thus the percipi would refer to the percipiens — the known
to knowledge and knowledge to the being who knows (in
his capacity as being, not as being known); that is, knowledge
refers to consciousness. This is what Husserl understood; for
if the noema is for him an unreal correlate of noesis, and if
its ontological law is the percipi, the noesis, on the contrary,
appears to him as reality, of which the principal characteris-
tic is to give itself to the reflection which knows it as “having
^eady been there before.” For the law of being in the know-
ing subject is to-be-conscious. Consciousness is not a mode of
particular knowledge which may be called an inner meaning
or self-knowledge; it is the dimension of transphenomenal be-
ing in the subject.
Let us look more closely at this dimension of being. We
said that consciousness is the knowing being in his capacity
as being and not as being known. This means that we must
2 It goes without saying that any attempt to replace the percipere by
fruitless. If we
® f ^ "acting." it would still be neces-
sary to guarantee the being of acting apart from the action.
11
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
abandon the primacy of knowledge if we wish to establish that
knowledge. Of course consciousness can know and know
itself. But it is in itself something other than a knowledge
turned back upon itself.
AH consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is conscious-
ness of something. This means that there is no consciousness
' which is not a positing of a transcendent object, or if you
prefer, that consciousness has no “content” We must re-
nounce those neutral “givens” which, according to the system
of reference chosen, find their place either “in the world” or
“in the psyche.” A table is not in consciousness — ^not even
in the capacity of a representation. A table is in space, beside
the window, etc. The existence of the table in fact is a center
of opacity for consciousness; it would require an infinite pro-
cess to inventory the total contents of a thing. To introduce
this opacity into consciousness would be to refer to infini ty
the inventory which it can make of itself, to make conscious-
ness a thing, and to deny the cogito. The first procedure of a
philosophy ought to be to expel things from consciousness
and to reestablish its true connection with the world, to know
that consciousness is a positional consciousness of the world.
AH consciousness is positional in that it transcends itself in
order to reach an object, and it exhausts' itself in this same
positing. All that there is of intention in my actual conscious-
ness is directed toward the outside, toward the table; all'
iny judgments or practical activities, all my present inclina-
tions transcend themselves; they aim at the table and are
absorbed in it. Not all consciousness is knowledge (there are
^ates of ^ective consciousness, for example), but all know-
iDgconsciousness can be knowledge only of its object.
.However, the necessary and sufficient condition for a
owmg consciousness to be knowledge of its object, is that
I e consciousness of itself as being that knowledge. This
a necessary condition, for if my consciousness were not
onsciousness of being consciousness of the table, it would
^ en be consciousness of that table without' consciousness of
rsm^ T- ^ words, it would be a consciousness igno-
suff! • ^ unconscious — which is absurd. This is a
of condition, for my being conscious of being conscious
j table suffices in fart for me to be conscious of it. That
taKif. °pt sufficient to permit me to affirm that this
in itself — but rather that it exists for me.
a is this consciousness of consciousness? We suffer
12 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
to such an extent from the illusion of the primacy of knowl-
edge that we are immediately ready to make of the conscious-
ness of consciousness an idea ideae in the manner of Spinoza;
that is, a knowledge of knowledge. Alain, wanting to express
the obvious “To know is to be conscious of knowing,” inter-
prets it in these terms: “To know is to know that one knows.”
In this way we should have defined reflection or positional
consciousness of consciousness, or better yet knowledge of
consciousness. This would be a complete consciousness
directed toward something which is not it; that is, toward
consciousness as object of reflection. It would then transcend
itself and like the positional consciousness of the world would
be exhausted in aiming at its object. But that object would be
itself a consciousness.
It does not seem possible for us to accept this interpreta-
tion of the consciousness of consciousness. The reduction of
consciousness to knowledge in fact involves our introducing
into consciousness the subject-object dualism which is typical
of knowledge. But if we accept the law of the knower-known
dyad, then a third term will be necessary in order for the
knower to become known in turn, and we will be faced with
this dilemma: Either we stop at any one term of the series —
the known, the knower known, the knower known by the
knower, etc. In this case the totality of the phenomenon falls
into the unknown; that is, we always bump up against a non-
self-conscious reflection and a final term. Or else we affirm
the necessity of an infinite regress (idea ideae ideae, etc.),
which is absurd. Thus to the necessity of ontologically es-
tablishing consciousness we would add a new necessity: that
of establishing it epistemologically. Are we obliged after all
to introduce the law of this dyad into consciousness?
Consciousness of self is not dual. If we wish to avoid an in-
finite regress, there must be an immediate, non-cognitive rela-
tion of the self to itself.
Furthermore the reflecting consciousness posits the con-
sciousness reflected-on, as its object. In the act of reflecting
I pass judgment on the consciousness reflected-on; I am
^amed of it, I am proud of it, I will it, I deny it, etc.
The immediate consciousness which I have of perceiving
does not permit me either to judge or to will or to be ashamed.
It does not know my perception, does not posit it; all that
there is of intention in my actual consciousness is directed
toward the outside, toward the world. In turn, this spontane-
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
13
ous consciousness of my perception is constitutive of my per-
ceptive consciousness. In other words, every positional con-
sciousness of an objeci is at the same time a non-positional
consciousness of itself. If I count the cigarettes which are in
that case, I have the impression of disclosing an objective
property of this collection of cigarettes: they are a dozen. This
property appears to my consciousness as a property existing in
the world. It is very possible that I have no positional con-
sciousness of counting them. Then I do not know myself as
counting. Proof of this is that children who are capable
of making an addition spontaneously can not explain sub-
sequently how they set about it. Piaget’s tests, which show
this, constitute an excellent refutation of the formula of Alain
— To know is to know that one knows. Yet at the moment
when these cigarettes are revealed to me as a dozen, I have
a non-thetic consciousness of my adding activity. If anyone
questioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask, “Vi^at are you
doing there?” I should reply at once, “I am counting.” This
reply aims not only at the instantaneous consciousness which I
can achieve by reflection but at those fleeting consciousnesses
which have passed without being reflected-on, those which
are forever not-reflected-on in my immediate past Thus re-
flection has no kind of primacy over the consciousness re-
fiected-on. It is not reflection wMch reveals the consciousness
reflected-on to itself. Quite the contrary, it is the non-reflective
consciousness which renders the reflection possible; there is a
pre-reflective cogito which is the condition of the Cartesian
cogito. At the same time it is the non-thetic consciousness of
counting which is the very condition of my act of adding. If it
were othenvise, how would the addition be the unifying theme
of my consciousness? In order that this theme should preside
over a whole series of syntheses of unifications and recogni-
tions, it must be present to itself, not as a thing but as an oper-
ative intention which can exist only as the revealing-revealed
(revelante-revSlee), to use an expression of Heidegger’s. Thus
in order to count, it is necessary to be conscious of counting.
Of course, someone may say, but this makes a circle. For
IS it not necessary that I count in fact in order to be conscious
of counting? That is true. However there is no circle, or if
you like, it is the very nature of consciousness to exist “in a
circle.” The idea can be expressed in these terms: Every con-
scious existence exists as consciousness of existing. We
Understand now why the first consciousness of consciousness
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
is not positional; it is because it is one with the consciousness
of which it is consciousness. At one stroke it determines
itself as consciousness of perception and as perception. The
necessity of syntax has compelled us hitherto to speak of the
“non-positional consciousness of self.” But we can no longer
use this expression in which the “of self” still evokes
the idea of knowledge. (Henceforth we shall put the “of”
inside parentheses to show that it merely satisfies a grammati-
cal requirement.)^
This self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new
consciousness, but as the only mode of existence which is
possible for a consciousness of something. Just as an extended
object is compelled to exist according to three dimensions, so
an intention, a pleasure, a grief can exist only as immediate
self-consciousness. If the intention is not a thing in conscious-
ness, then the being of the intention can be only consciousness.
It is not necessary to understand by this that on the one- hand,
some external cause (an organic trouble, an unconscious im-
pulse, another Erlebnis) could determine that a psychic event_
— a pleasure, for example — ^produce itself, that on the
other hand, this event so determined in its material structure
should be compelled to produce itself as self-consciousness.
This would be to make the non-thetic consciousness a quality
of the positional consciousness (in the sense that the percep-
tion, positional consciousness of that table, would have as
addition the quality of self-consciousness) and would thus
fall back into Ae illusion of the theoretical primacy of knowl-
edge. This would be moreover to make the psychic event a
thing and to qualify it with “conscious” just as I can qualify
this blotter with “red.” Pleasure can not be distinguished —
even logically — ^from consciousness of pleasure. Consciousness
(of) pleasure is constitutive of the pleasure as the very mode
of its own existence, as the material of which it is made, and
not as a form which is imposed by a blow upon a hedonistic
material. Pleasure can not exist “before” consciousness of
pleasure — not even in the form of potentiality or potency. A
potential pleasure can exist only as consciousness (of) being
potential. Potencies of consciousness exist only as conscious-
ness of potencies.
Conversely, as I showed earlier, we must avoid defining
pleasure by the consciousness which I have of it. This would
<Tr. Since EngUsh syntax does not
freely translate conscience (de) soi as
require the “of,” I shaU henceforth
“self-consciousness.”
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
15
be to fall into an idealism of consciousness which would
bring us by indirect means to the primacy of knowledge.
Pleasure must not disappear behind its own self-conscious-
ness; it is not a representation, it is a concrete event, full
and- absolute. It is no more a quality of self-consciousness
than self-consciousness is a quality of pleasure. There is no
more first a consciousness which receives subsequently
the ^ect “pleasure” like water which one stains, than there
is first a pleasure (unconscious or psychological) which re-
ceives subsequently the quality of “conscious” like a pencil
of light rays. There is an indivisible, indissoluble being —
definitely not a substance supporting its qualities like particles
of being, but a being which is existence through and through.
Pleasure is the being of self-consciousness and this self-con-
sciousness is the law of being of pleasure. This is what
Heidegger expressed very well when he wrote (though speak-
ing of Dasein, not of consciousness) : “The ‘how’ {essentia)
of this being, so far as it is possible to speak of it generally,
must be conceived in terms of its existence {existentia)''*
This means that consciousness is not produced as a particular
instance of an abstract possibility but that in rising to the
center of being, it creates and supports its essence — ihat is,
the synthetic order of its possibilities.
This means also that the type of being of consciousness is
the opposite of that which the ontological proof reveals to us.
Since consciousness is not possible before being, but since its
being is the source and condition of all possibility, its exis-
tence implies its essence. Husserl expresses this aptly in speak-
ing of the “necessity of fact” In order for there to be an
essence of pleasure, there must be first the fact of a conscious-
ness (of) this pleasure. It is futile to try to invoke pretended
of consciousness of which the articulated whole would
constitute the essence. A law is a transcendent object of
owledge; there can be consciousness of a law, not a law
consciousness. For the same reasons it is impossible to
sign to a consciousness a motivation other than itself. Other-
thp '^ould be^ necessary to conceive that consciousness to
It w it is an effect, is not conscious (of) itself,
out necessary in some manner that it should be with-
being. We should fall into that too
or a which makes consciousness semi-conscious
thrnt, u consciousness is consciousness through and
through. It can be limited only by itself.
16
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
This self-determination of consciousness must not be con-
ceived as a genesis, as a becoming, for that would force us to
suppose that consciousness is prior to its own existence.
Neither is it necessary to conceive of this self-creation as an
act, for in that case consciousness would be conscious (of)
itself as an act, which it is not. Consciousness is a plenum of
existence, and this determination of itself by itself is an
essential characteristic. It would even be wise not to misuse
the expression “cause of self,” which allows us to suppose a
progression, a relation of self-cause to self-elfect. It would be
more exact to say very simply: The existence of consciousness
comes from consciousness itself. By that we need not under-
stand that consciousness “derives from nothingness.” There
can not be “nothingness of consciousness” before conscious-
ness. “Before” consciousness one can conceive only of a
plenum of being of which no element can refer to an absent
consciousness. If there is to be nothingness of consciousness,
there must be a consciousness which has been and which is
no more and a witnessing consciousness which poses the
nothingness of the first consciousness for a synthesis of rec-
ognition. Consciousness is prior to nothingness and “is de-
rived” from being.®
One will perhaps have some difficulty in accepting these
conclusions. But considered more carefully, they will appear
perfectly clear. The paradox is not that there are “self-acti-
vated” existences but that there is no otlier kind. What is
truly unthinkable is passive existence; that is, existence which
perpetuates itself without having the force either to produce
itself or to preserve itself. From this point of view there is
nothing more incomprehensible than the principle of inertia.
Indeed where would consciousness “come” from if it did
“come” from something? From the limbo of the unconscious
or of the physiological. But if we ask ourselves how this limbo
in its turn can exist and where it derives its existence, we find
ourselves faced with the concept of passive existence; that is,
we can no more absolutely understand how this non-conscious
given (unconscious or physiological) which does not derive its
existence from itself, can nevertheless perpetuate this existence
spiat CMtainly does not mean that consciousness is the foundation of
of thTt- as we shall see later, there is a full contingency
of the being of consciousness. We wish only to show (I) That nothins is
the cause of consciousness. (2) That consciousness is the cause of its own
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
17
and find in addition the ability to produce a consciousness.
This demonstrates the great favor which the proof a con-
tingentia mundi has enjoyed.
Thus by abandoning the primacy of knowledge, we
have discovered the being of the knower and encountered the
absolute, that same absolute which the rationalists of the
seventeenth century had defined and logically constituted as
an object of knowledge. But precisely because the question
concerns an absolute of existence and not of knowledge, it is
not subject to that famous objection according to which a
known absolute is no longer an absolute because it becomes
relative to the knowledge which one has of it. In fact the
absolute here is not the result of a logical construction on
the ground of knowledge but the subject of the most concrete
of experiences. And it is not at all relative to this experience
because it is this experience. Likewise it is a non-substantial
absolute. The ontological error of Cartesian rationalism is not
to have seen that if the absolute is defined by the primacy of
existence over essence, it can not be conceived as a substance.
Consciousness has nothing substantial, it is pure “appearance”
in the sense that it exists only to the degree to which it ap-
pears. But it is precisely because consciousness is pure appear-
ance, because it is total emptiness (since the entire world is
outside it) — ^it is because of this identity of appearance and
existence within it that it can be considered as the absolute.
IV. THE BEING OF THE PERCIPI
It seems that we have arrived at the goal of our inquiry. We
have reduced things to the united totality of their appear-
ances, and we have established that these appearances lay
claim to a being which is no longer itself appearance. The
*‘percipV’ referred us to a percipiens, the being of which has
been revealed to us as consciousness. Thus we have attained
the ontological foundation of knowledge, the first being to
whom all other appearances appear, the absolute in relation
to which every phenomenon is relative. This is no longer the
subject in Kant’s meaning of the term, but it is subjectivity
itself, the immanence of self in self. Henceforth we have
escaped idealism. For the latter, being is measured by knowl-
edge, which subjects it to the law of duality. There is only
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
known being; it is a question of thought itself. Thought
appears only through its own products; that is, we always
apprehend it only as the signification of thoughts produced,
and the philosopher in quest of thought must question the
established sciences in order to derive it from them as the con-
dition of their possibility. We, on the other hand, have appre-
hended a being which is not subject to knowledge and which
founds knowledge, a thought which is definitely not given as a
representation or a signification of expressed thoughts, but
which is directly apprehended such as it is — and this mode of
apprehension is not a phenomenon of knowledge but is the
structure of being. We find ourselves at present on the ground
of the phenomenology of Husserl although Husserl himself
has not always been faithful to his first intuition. Are we
satisfied? We have encountered a transphenomenal being,
but is it actually the being to which the phenomenon of being
refers? Is it indeed the being of the phenomenon? In
other words is consciousness sufficient to provide the
foundation for the appearance qua appearance? We have
extracted its being from the phenomenon in order to give it
to consciousness, and we anticipated that consciousness would
subsequently restore it to the phenomenon. Is this possible?
We shall find our answer in the examination of the ontologi-
cal exigencies of the percipi.
Let us note first that there is a being of the thing per-
ceived — as perceived. Even if I wished to reduce this table
to a synthesis of subjective impressions, I must at least remark
that it reveals itself qua table through this synthesis, that it is
the transcendent limit of the synthesis, the reason for it and
its end. The table is before knowledge and can not be identi-
fied with the knowledge which we have of it; otherwise it
would be consciousness — i.e., pure immanence — and it would
disappear as table. For the same cause even if a pure distinc-
tion of re^on is to separate the table from the synthesis of
subjective impressions through which I apprehend it, at least
It c^ not be this synthesis; that would be to reduce it to a
synthetic activity of connection. In so far then as the known
can not^ e r^bsorbed into knowledge, we must discover for
we are told, is the percipi. Let us
reduced ^1 being of the percipi can not be
any more tbn percipiens — i.e., to consciousness —
y more than the table is reduced to the bond of representa-
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
19
tions. At most we can say that it is relative to this being. But
this relativity does not render unnecessary an examination of
the being of the percipi.
Now the mode of the percipi is the passive. If then the
being of the phenomenon resides in its percipi, this being
is passivity. Relativity and passivity — ^such are the character-
istic structures of the esse in so far as this is reduced to the
percipi. What is passivity? I am passive when I undergo a
modification of which I am not the origin; that is, neither the
source nor the creator. Thus my being supports a mode of
being of which it is not the source. Yet in order for me to
support, it is still necessary that I exist, and due to this fact
my existence is always situated on the other side of passivity.
‘To support passively,” for example, is a conduct which I
assume and which engages my liberty as much as to “reject
resolutely.” If I am to be for always “the-one-who-has-been-
offended,” I rriust persevere in my being; that is, I myself
assume my existence. But all the same I respond on my own
account in some way and I assume my offense; I cease to be
passive in relation to it Hence we have this choice of alter-
natives: either, indeed, I am not passive in my being, in which
case I become the foundation of my affections even if at first
I have not been the origin of them — or I am affected with
passivity in my very existence, my being is a received being,
and hence all falls into nothingness. Thus passivity is a
doubly relative phenomenon, relative to the activity of the
one who acts and to the existence of the one who suffers. This
implies that passivity can not affect the actual being of the
passive existent; it is a relation of one being to another being
and not of one being to a nothingness. It is impossible
that the percipere affects the perceptum of being, for in order
for the perceptum to be affected it would of necessity have to
be^ already given in some way and exist before having re-
ceived being. One can conceive of a creation on condition
that the created being recover itself, tear itself away from the
creator in order to close in on itself immediately and assume
its being; it is in this sense that a book exists as distinct from
its author. But if the act of creation is to be continued
indefinitely, if the created being is to be supported even in
its inmost parts, if it does not have its own independence, if
It is in itself only nothingness — ^then the creature is in no
Way distmguished from its creator; it is absorbed in him; we
20
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
are dealing with a false transcendence, and the creator can
not have even an illusion of getting out of his subjectivity.®
Furthermore the passivity of the recipient demands an
equal passivity on the part of the agent. This is expressed in
the principle of action and reaction; it is because my hand
can be crushed, grasped, cut, that my hand can crush, cut,
grasp. What element of passivity can we assign to perception,
to knowledge? They are all activity, all spontaneity. It is
precisely because it is pure spontaneity, because nothing can
get a grip on it that consciousness can not act upon anything.
Thus the esse est percipi would require that consciousness,
pure spontaneity which can not act upon anything, give being
to a transcendent nothingness, at the same time keeping it
in its state of nothingness. So much nonsense! Husserl has
attempted to overcome these objections by introducing passivi-
ty into the noesis; this is the hyle or pure flux of experience
and the matter of the passive syntheses. But he has only added
an additional difficulty to those which we have mentioned.
He has introduced in fact those neutral givens, the impossi-
bility of which we have shown earlier. To be sure, these are
not “contents” of consciousness, but they remain only
so much the more unintelligible. The hyle in fact could
not be consciousness, for it would disappear in translucency
and could not offer that resisting basis of impressions which
must be surpassed toward the object. But if it does not
belong to consciousness, where does it derive its being and its
opacity? How can it preserve at once the opaque resistance
of things and the subjectivity of thought? Its esse can not
come to it from a percipi since it is not even perceived, for
consciousness transcends it toward the objects. But if the
hyle^ derives its being from itself alone, we meet once again
the insoluble problem of the connection of consciousness with
existents independent of it. Even if we grant to Husserl that
there is hyletic stratum for the noesis, we can not conceive
how consciousness can transcend this subjective toward
objectivity. In giving to the hyle both the characteristics of
a thing and the characteristics of consciousness, Husserl be-
heved that he facilitated the passage from the one to the
succeeded only in creating a hybrid being
w 1C consciousness rejects and which can not be a part of
Cartesian docti
logical culmmation in the work of Spinoza.
of substance finds its
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
21
Furthermore, as we have seen, the percipi implies that the
law of being of the perceptum is relativity. Can we conceive
that the being of the thing known is relative to the knowl-
edge? What can the relativity of being mean for an existent
if not that the existent has its own being in something other
than in itself; that is, in an existent which it is not. Certainly
it would not be inconceivable that a being should be external
to itself if' one means that this being is its own externality.
But such is not the case here. The perceived being is before
consciousness; consciousness can not reach it, and it can not
enter into consciousness; and as the perceived being is cut
ofi from consciousness, it exists cut off from its own existence.
It would be no use to make of it an unreal in the manner of
Husserl; even as unreal it must e^dst.
Thus the two determinations of relativity and of passivity,
which can concern modes of being, can on no account apply
to being. The esse of the phenomenon can not be its percipi.
The transphenomenal being of consciousness can not provide
a basis for the transphenomenal being of the phenomenon.
Here we see the error of the phenomenalists: having justifiably
reduced the object to the connected series of its appearances,
they believed they had reduced its being to the succession of
its modes of being. That is why they have explained it by
concepts which can be applied only to the modes of being,
for they are pointing out the relations between a plurality of
already existing beings.
V. THE ONTOLOGICAL PROOF
Being has not been given its due. We believed we had dis-
pensed with granting transphenomenality to the being of the
phenomenon because we had discovered the transphenome-
nality of the being of consciousness. We are going to see, on
the contrary, that this very transphenomenality requires that
of the being of the phenomenon. There is an “ontological
proof” to be derived not from the reflective cogito but from
the pre-reflective being of the percipiens. This we shall
now trj' to demonstrate.
All ^ consciousness is consciousness of something. This
definition of consciousness can be taken in two very distinct
Senses: either w'e understand by this that consciousness is
constitutive of the being of its object, or it means that con-
22 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
sciousness in its inmost nature is a relation to a tran-
scendent being. But the first interpretation of the formula
destroys itself: to be conscious of something is to be con-
fronted with a concrete and full presence which is not
consciousness. Of course one can be conscious of an absence.
But this absence appears necessarily as a pre-condition of
presence. As we have seen, consciousness is a real subjectivity
and the impression is a subjective plenitude. But this sub-
jectivity can not go out of itself to posit a transcendent object
in such a way as to endow it with a plenitude of impressions.'^
If then we wish at any price to make the being of the phe-
nomenon depend on consciousness, the object must be dis-
tinguished from consciousness not by its presence but by its
absence, not by its plenitude, but by its nothingness. If being
belongs to consciousness, the object is not consciousness, not
to the extent that it is another being, but that it is non-being.
This is the appeal to the infinite of which we spoke in the
first section of this work. For Husserl, for example, the anima-
tion of the hyletic nucleus by the only intentions which can
find their fulfillment (Erfullung) in this hyle is not enough to
bring us outside of subjectivity. The truly objectifying inten-
tions are empty intentions, those which aim beyond the
present subjective appearance at the infinite totality of the
series of appearances.
We must further understand that the intentions aim at
appearances which are never to be given at one time. It is an
impossibility on principle for the terms of an infinite series
to exist all at the same time before consciousness, along with
the real absence of all these terms except for the one which is
the foundation of objectivity. If present these impressions —
even in infinite number — 'Would dissolve in the subjective; it
is their absence which gives them objective being. Thus the
being of the object is pure non-being. It is defined as a
lack. It is that which escapes, that which by definition wall
never be given, that which offers itself only in fleeting and
successive profiles.
But how can non-being be the foundation of being? How
can the absent, expected subjective become thereby the
objective? A great joy which I hope for, a grief which I
dread, acquire from that fact a certain transcendence. This I
admit. But that transcendence in immanence does not bring
c ^ ^ impressions are objectified into qualities
nf tnf» fMiTiOf ^
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
23
us out of the subjective. It is true that things give themselves in
profile; that is, simply by appearances. And it is true that
each appearance refers to other appearances. But each of them
is already in itself alone a transcendent being, not a subjective
material of impressions — a plenitude of being, not a lack — a
presence, not an absence. It is futile by a sleight of hand to
attempt to found the reality of the object on the subjective
plenitude of impressions and its objectivity on non-being; the
objective will never come out of the subjective nor the
transcendent from immanence, nor being from non-being.
But, we are told, Husserl defines consciousness precisely as a
transcendence. In truth he does. This is what he posits. This
is his essential discovery. But from the moment that he makes
of the noema an unreal, a correlate of the noesis, a noema
whose esse is percipi, he is totally unfaithful to his principle.
Consciousness is consciousness of something. This means
that transcendence is the constitutive structure of conscious-
ness; that is, that consciousness is bom supported by a being
which is not itself. This is what we call the ontological proof.
No doubt someone will reply that the existence of the demand
of consciousness does not prove that this demand ought to
be satisfied. But this objection can not hold up against an
analysis of what Husserl calls intentionality, though, to be
sure, he misunderstood its essential character. To say that
consciousness is consciousness of something means that for
consciousness there is no being outside of that precise
obligation to be a revealing intuition of something — i.e., of a
fianscendent being. Not only does pure subjectivity, if
initially given, fail to transcend itself to posit the objective; a
“pure” subjectivity disappears. What can properly be called
subjectivity is consciousness (of) consciousness. But this
consciousness (of being) consciousness must be qualified in
sorne way, and it can be qualified only as revealing intuition
or it is nothing. Now a revealing intuition implies something
revealed. Absolute subjectivity can be established only in the
face of something revealed; imman ence can be defined only
Within the apprehension of a transcendent. It might appear
that there is an echo here of Kant’s refutation of problemati-
cal idealism. But we ought rather to think of Descartes.
We are here on the ground of being, not of knowledge. It is
not a question of showing that the phenomena of inner sense
nnply^ the existence of objective spatial phenomena, but that
consciousness implies in its being a non-conscious and
24 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
transph-cnomenal being. In particular there is no point in
replying that in fact subjectivity implies objectivity and that
it constitutes itself in constituting the objective; we have
seen that subjectivity is powerless to constitute the objective.
To say that consciousness is consciousness of something is to
say that it must produce itself as a revealed-revelation of a
being which is not it and which gives itself as already existing
when consciousness reveals it.
Thus we have left pure appearance and have arrived at
full being. Consciousness is a being whose existence posits
its essence, and inversely it is consciousness of a being, whose
essence implies its existence; that is, in which appear-
ance lays claim to being. Being is everywhere. Certainly we
could apply to consciousness the definition which Heidegger
reserves for Dasein and say that it is a being such that in
its being, its being is in question. But it would be necessary
to complete the definition and formulate it more like this;
consciousness is a being such that in Us being, its being is in
question in so far as this being implies a being other than
itself.
We must understand that this being is no other than the
transphenomenal being of phenomena and not a noumenal
being which is hidden behind them. It is the being of this
table, of this package of tobacco, of the lamp, more generally
the being of the world which is implied by consciousness. It
requires simply that the being of that which appears does not
exist only in so far as it appears. The transphenomenal being
of what exists for consciousness is itself in itself {lui-meme en
soi).
VI. BEING-IN-ITSELF
We can now form a few definite conclusions about the
phenomenon of being, which we have considered in order
to make the preceding observations. Consciousness is the re-
vealed-revelation of existents, and existents appear before
consciousness on the foundation of their being. Neverthe-
less the primary characteristic of the being of an existent is
never to reveal itself completely to consciousness. An existent
can not be stripped of its being; being is the ever present
^ndation of the existent; it is everywhere in it and nowhere.
ITiere is no being which is not the being of a certain mode of
25
the pursuit of being
being, none ^hich^oan not be f “ametimt
of being which p™ beyond the eidstent, not toward
Consciousness can always pas ^ y .
being, but toward the
:i L"*— rrr to^-cen^inrof t: ‘Sttt
U r«e\,s”fo conscio..ngs is the ph— n
of being. This meaning has itself a bemg. based on wm
“^t^lofthis point of view we can underhand to
famous Scholastic argument , concerns being,
vicious circle in every P™P?““°? J^^tmSes SLg bS
since any judgment about bemg Y necessary
in actuality there is no vicious circle, fo its
again to pass beyond the bemg h^inp of every
meaning; the meaning of being is valid for , of
phenomenon, including its own bemg. indicates
being is not being, as we have akeady noted. But mdica
being and requires it-although, m truth, the ontoio^
proof which we -mentioned above is ^ li^ for the
Uuely for it; tore is p^yfsuSdent
Whole domain of consciousness. But tms prooi
to justify, all the information which we ca every
phenomenon of being. The phenomenon c ’ j,onscious-
primary phenomenon, is immediately ,, g_
ness. We have at each instant what H^degscr caUs ^p^^^
ontological comprehension of it; that is, o P
accompanied by a fixing in concepts and "^^^^ahon For^s
at present, then, there is no question of of
pheLmenon for the sake of trying to fix the mean g
being. We must observe always: _ valid
(1) That this elucidation of the meaning of
only for the being of the phenomenon. Since ^ecessi-
consciousness is radically different, its meaning , ,
tate a particular elucidation, in terrns of the
tion of another type of being, being-foMtse ^
soi), w'hich we shall define later and which is opp
being-in-itself (/’e/re-cn-5of) ofthephenomenon.
(2) That the elucidation of the meaning o g
itself which we are going to attempt here can be only P
visional. The aspects which will be de-
significations which ultimately we must appre en ^
26 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS -
termine. In particular the preceding reflections have per-
mitted us to distinguish two absolutely separated regions of
being: the being of the pre-refiective cogito and the being of
the phenomenon. But although the concept of being has this
peculiarity of being divided into two regions without com-
munication, we must nevertheless explain how these two
regions can be placed under the same heading. That
will necessitate the investigation of these two types of
being, and it is evident that we can not truly grasp the mean-
ing of either one until we can establish their true connection
with the notion of being in general and the relations which
unite them. We have indeed established by the examination
of non-positional self-consciousness that the being of the
phenomenon can on no account act upon consciousness. In
this way we have ruled out a realistic conception of the rela-
tions of the phenomenon with consciousness.
We have shown also by the examination of the ,sponta-
neity of the non-reflective cogito that consciousness can not get
out of its subjectivity if the latter has been initially given, and
that consciousness can not act upon transcendent being nor
without contradiction admit of the passive elements necessary
in order to constitute a transcendent being arising from them.
Thus we have ruled out the idealist solution of the problem.
It appears that we have barred all doors and that we are now
condemned to regard transcendent being and consciousness
as two closed totalities without possible communication. It
will be necessary to show that the problem allows a solution
other than realism or idealism.
certain number of characteristics can be fixed on im-
mediately because for the most part they follow naturally
from what we have just said.
A clear view of the phenomenon of being has often been
obscured by a very common prejudice which we shall call
creationism.” Since r ,ople supposed that God had given
bemg to the world, jeing always appeared tainted with a
certain passivity. But a creation ex nihilo can not explain
the co^g to pass of being; for if being conceived in a
subjectmty, even a divine subjectivity, it remains a mode of
intra-subjective being. Such subjectivity can not have even the
representation of an objectivity, and consequently it can not
.affected with the will to create the objective. Further-
the fiilm ®tidd^y placed outside the subjective by
the fulguration of which Leibniz speaks, can only affirm
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
27
itself as distinct from and opposed to its creator; otherwise it
dissolves in him. The theory of perpetual creation, by remov-
ing from being what the Germans call Selbstandigkeit,
makes it disappear in the divine subjectivity. If being exists as
over against God, it is its own support; it does not preserve
the least trace of divine creation. In a word, even if it had
been created, being-in-itself would be inexplicable in terms of
creation; for it assumes its being beyond the creation.
This is equivalent to saying that being is uncreated. But we
need not conclude that being creates itself, which would
suppose that it is prior to itself. Being can not be causa sui in
the manner of consciousness. Being is itself. This means that
-it is neither passivity nor activity. Both of these notions are
human and designate human conduct or the instruments of
human conduct. There is activity when a conscious being uses
means with an end in view. And we call those objects passive
on which our activity is exercised, inasmuch as they do not
spontaneously aim at the end which we make them serve. In
a word, man is active and the means which he employs are
called passive. These concepts, put absolutely, lose all mean-
ing. In particular, being is not active; in order for there to be
an end and means, there must be being. For an even stronger
reason it can not be passive, for in order to be passive, it must
be. The self-consistency of being is beyond the active as it is
beyond the passive.
Being is equally beyond negation as beyond afiSrmation.
Affirmation is always affirmation of something; that is, the act
of affirming is distinguished from the thing affir med. But if
we suppose an affirmation in which the affirmed comes to
fulfill the aflfirming and is confused with it, this affirmation can
not be affirmed — owing to too much of plenitude and the
immediate inherence of the noema in the noesis. It is there
that we^ find being — ^if we are to define it more clearly — ^in
connection with consciousness. It is the noema in the noesis;
mat is, the inherence in itself without the least distance,
rom this point of view, we should not call it “ imm anence,”
or immanence in spite of all connection with self is stffl
that very slight withdrawal which can be realized — away from
me self. But being is not a connection with itself. It is itself.
t IS an immanence which can not realize itself, an aflfirma-
lon which can^ not affirm itself, an activity which can not
act, because it is glued to itself. Everything happens as if , in
order to free the aflfirmation of self from the heart of being,
28 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
there is necessary a decompression of being. Let us not, how-
ever, thintc that being is merely one undifferentiated self-
aflSrmation; the undifferentiation of the in-itseif is beyond an
infinity of self-aflSrmations, inasmuch as there is an infimty of
modes of self-affirming. We may summarize these first conclu-
sions by saying that being is in itself.
But if being is in itself, this means that it does not refer
to itself as self-consciousness does. It is this self. It is itself
so completely that the perpetual reflection which constitutes
the self is dissolved in an identity. That is why being is at
bottom beyond the self, and our first formula can be only an
approximation due to the requirements of language. In fact
being is opaque to itself precisely because it is filled with
itself. This can be better expressed by saying that being is
what it is. This statement is in appearance strictly analytical.
Actually it is far from being reduced to that principle of
identity which is the unconditioned principle of all analytical
judgments. First the formula designates a particular re-
gion of being, that of being in-itself. We shall see that the
being of for-itself is defined, on the contrary, as being what
it is not and not being what it is. The question here then is
of a regional principle and is as such synthetical. Furthermore
it is necessary to oppose this formula — being in-itself is what
it is — -to that which designates the being of consciousness.
The latter in fact, as we shall see, has to be what it is.
This instructs us as to the special meaning which must
be given to the “is” in the phrase, being is what it is. From
the moment that beings exist who have to be what they are,
the fact of being what they are is no longer a purely axiomatic
characteristic; it is a contingent principle of being in-itself. In
this sense, the principle of identity, the principle of analytical
judgments, is also a regional synthetical principle of being. It
desi^ates the opacity of being-in-itself. This opacity has
nothing to do with our position in relation to the in-itself; it
is not that we are obliged to apprehend it and to observe it
because we are “without,” Being-in-itself has no within which
is opposed to a without and which is analogous to a judgment,
a law, a consciousness of itself. The in-itself has nothing
secret; it is solid {massif}. In a sense we can desig-
Mte it as a synthesis. But it is the most indissoluble of all:
the synthesis of itself with itself.
"^e result is evidently that being is isolated in its being
an that it does not enter into any connection with what is
THE PURSUIT OF BEING
29
not itself. Transition, becoming, anything which permits us
to say that being is not yet what it will be and that it is
already what it is not — all that is forbidden on principle. For
being is the being of becoming and due to this fact it is
beyond becoming. It is what it is. This means that by itself
it can not even be what it is not; we have seen indeed that it
can encompass no negation. It is full positivity. It knows no
otherness; it never posits itself as other-than-another-being.
It can support no connection with the other. It is itself in-
definitely and it exhausts itself in being. From this point of
view we shall see later that it is not subject to temporality.
It is, and when it gives way, one can not even say that it no
longer is. Or, at least, a consciousness can be conscious of it
as no longer being, precisely because consciousness is temporal.
But being itself does not exist as a lack there where it was;
the full positivity of being is re-formed on its giving way. It
was and at present other beings are: that is all.
Finally — ^this will be our third characteristic — ^being-
in-itself is. This means that being can neither be derived from
the possible nor reduced to the necessary. Necessity concerns
the connection between ideal propositions but not that of
existents. An existing phenomenon can never be derived from
another existent qua existent. This is what we shall call the
contingency of being-in-itself. But neither can being-in-itself
be derived from a possibility. The possible is a structure of the
for-itself; that is, it belongs to the other region of being. Be-
ing-in-itself is never either possible or impossible. It is. This is
what consciousness expresses in anthropomorphic terms by
saying that being is superfluous {de trop) — ^that is, that con-
sdousness absolutely can not derive being from anything,
either from another being, or from a possibility, or from ' a
necessary law. Uncreated, without reason for being, without
any connection with another being, being-in-itself is de trop
for eternity.
Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is. These are
the three characteristics which the preliminary examination of
the phenomenon of being allows us to assign to the being of
phenomena. For the moment it is impossible to push our
investigation further. This is not yet the examination of the
in~itself — ^which is never anything but what it is — ^which will
allow us to establish and to explain its relations "with the
for-itself. Thus we have left “appearances” and have been led
progressively to posit two types of being, the in-itself and the
30
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
for-itself, concerning which we have as yet only superficial
and incomplete information. A multitude of questions remain
unanswered; What is the ultimate meaning of these two
types of being? For what reasons do they both belong to
being in general? What is the meaning of that being which
includes within itself these two radically separated regions of
being? If idealism and realism both fail to explain the rela-
tions which in fact unite these regions which in theory are
without communication, what other solution can we find for
this problem? And how can the being of the phenomenon be
transphenomenal?
It is to attempt to reply to these questions that I have
written the present work.
PART ONE
The Problem of Mothing)tess
CHAPTER ONE
The Origin of Negation
I. THE QUESTION
of ^oing. But we have been
^V^se since we have not been able to
which wAk ‘^°il"^otion between the two regions of being
chntpn discover^ No doubt this is because we have
facp^r,Jh ^"fo^o^ate approach. Descartes found himself
the rpln^;r. problem when he had to deal with
for the cnh body. He planned then to look
substance a where the union of thinking
is in the inT substance was actually effected — ^that
To be sure, our
iuiarinafinn a Descartes and we do not conceive of
^at it i<? nrvf retain is the reminder
‘elation in separate the two terms of a
is a sv^m^si^rn
cot be coverert Consequently the results of analysis can
Lanorfe ^Sain by the moments of this s)mthesis.
something nnt ^ abstraction is made when
^ in an existing in isolation is thought of
can cyJc» u *Hie concrete by contrast is a totality
inr him red ha ^ alone. Husserl is of the same opinion;
form. On til ^ ^^^nction because color can not exist with-
its determinatm^ ^ spatial-temporal thing, with
ns, IS an example of the concrete. From
33
34
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
this point of view, consciousness is an abstraction since it
conceals within itself an ontological source in the region of
the in-itself, and conversely the phenomenon is likewise an
abstraction since it must “appear” to consciousness. The con-
crete can be only the synthetic totality of which consciousness,
like the phenomenon, constitutes only moments. The concrete
is man within the world in that specific union of man with the
world which Heidegger, for example, calls “being-in-the-
world.” We deliberately begin with the abstract if we question
“experience” as Kant does, inquiring into the conditions of
its possibility — or if we effect a phenomenological reduction
like Husserl, who would reduce the world to the state of the
noema-correlate of consciousness. But we will no more
succeed in restoring the concrete by the summation or or-
ganization of the elements which we have abstracted from it
than Spinoza can reach substance by the infinite summation
of its modes.
The relation of the regions of being is an original emer-
gence^ and is a part of the very structure of these beings. But
we discovered this in our first observations. It is enough
now to open our eyes and question ingenuously this total-
ity which is man-in-the-world. It is by the description of this
totmity that we shall be able to reply to these two questions;
(1) What is the synthetic relation which we call being-in-
fee-world? (2) What must man and fee world be in order
tor a relation between them to be possible? In truth, the two
que^ions are interdependent, and we can not hope to reply
separately. But each type of human conduct, being
^ ’^^^^ase for us simul-
taneously man, the world, and the relation which unites them,
SaHfS envisage these forms of conduct as
A' 1 ^ apprehensible and not as subjective affects
We Of collection,
nattem of ourselves to the study of a single
Sand '^o^'cary to describe
profound meaning of fee rela-
qtem which can serve us as a guiding thread in cfur
the desired
is at tS; ^ apprehend him such as he
tms moment m fee world, I establish that he stands be-
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
35
fore being in an attitude of interrogation. At the very moment
when I ask, “Is there any conduct which can reveal to me the
relation of man with the world?” I pose a question. This
question I can consider objectively, for it matters little
whether the questioner is myself or the reader who reads my
work and who is questioning along with me. But on the
other hand, the question is not simply the objective totality
of the words printed on this page; it is indifferent to the
symbols which express it. In a word, it is a human attitude
Med with meaning. What does this attitude reveal to us?
In every question we stand before a being which we are
questioning. Every question presupposes a being who ques-
tions and a being which is questioned. This is not the original
relation of man to being-in-itself, but rather it stands within
the limitations of this relation and takes it for granted. On
the other hand, this being which we question, we question
about something. That about which I question the being
participates in the transcendence of being. I question being
about its ways of being or about its being. From this point of
view the question is a kind of expectation; I expect a reply
from the being questioned. That is, on the basis of a pre-
interrogafive familiarity with being, I expect from this being a
revelation of its being or of its way of being. The reply will
be a “yes” or a “no.” It is the existence of these two equally
objective and contradictory possibilities which on principle
distinguishes the question from affirmation or negation.
There are questions which on the surface do not permit a
negative reply — ^like, for example, the one which we put
earlier, “What does this attitude reveal to us?” But actually we
see that it is always possible with questions of this t5q)e to
reply, “Nothing” or “Nobody” or “Never.” Thus at the mo-
ment when I ask, “Is there any conduct which can reveal to
relation of man with the world?” I admit on
principle the possibility of a negative reply such as, “No, such
a conduct does not exist.” This means that we admit to being
seed with the transcendent fact of the non-existence of such
conduct
One will perhaps be tempted not to believe in the objec-
®^^^®rice of a non-being; one will say that in this case
e act simply refers me to my subjectivity; I would learn
om the transcendent being that the conduct sought is a pure
place, to call this conduct a pure
oa is to disguise the negation without removing it “To
36 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
be pure fiction” is equivalent here to “to be only a fiction.”
Consequently to destroy the reality of the negation is to cause
the reality of the reply to disappear. This feply, in fact, is
the very being which gives it to me; that is, reveals the nega-
tion to me. There exists then for the questioner the per-
manent objective possibility of a negative reply. In relation to
this possibility the questioner, by the very fact that he is
questioning, posits himself as in a state of indetermination;
he does not know whether the reply will be affirmative or
negative. Thus the question is a bridge set up between two
non-beings; the non-being of knowing in man, the possibility
of non-being of being in transcendent being. Finally the
question implies the existence of a truth. By the very question
the questioner affirms that he expects an objective reply, such
that we can say of it, “It is thus and not otherwise.” In a
word the truth, as differentiated from being, introduces a
third non-being as determining the question — ^the non-being
of limitation. This triple non-being conditions every question
and in particular the metaphysical question, which is our
question.
We set out upon our pursuit of being, and it seemed to
us that the series of our questions had led us to the heart of
being. But behold, at the moment when we thought we were
arriving at the goal, a glance cast on the question itself has
revealed to us suddenly that we are encompassed with noth-
ingness. The permanent possibility of non-being, outside us
and within, conditions our questions about being. Further-
more it is non-beiog which is going to limit the reply. What
being will be must of necessity arise on the basis of what it is
not. Whatever being is, it will allow this formulation; “Being
is that and outside of that, nothing.”
Thus a new component of the real has just appeared to
^non-being. Our problem is thereby complicated, for we
may no longer limit our inquiry to the relations of the human
being to^ being in-itself, but must include also the relations of
being with non-being and the relations of human non-being
with transcendent-being. But let us consider further.
n. NEGATIONS
Someone will object that being-in-itself can not furnish neg-
ative replies. Did not we ourselves say that it. was beyond
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
37
affirmation as beyond negation? Furthermore ordinary ex-
perience reduced to itself does not seem to disclose any non-
being to us. I think that there are fifteen hundred francs in
my wallet, and I find only thirteen hundred; that does not
mea'n, someone will tell us, that experience had discovered
for me the non-being of fifteen hundred francs but simply
that I have counted thirteen hundred-franc notes. Negation
proper (we are told) is unthinkable; it could appear only on
the level of an act of judgment by which I should establish a
comparison between the result anticipated and the result ob-
tained. Thus negation would be simply a quality of judg-
ment and the expectation of the questioner would be an ex-
pectation of the judgment-response. As for Nothingness, this
would derive its origin from negative judgments; it would be
a concept establishing the transcendent unity of all these judg-
ments, a propositional function of the type, “X is not.”
We see where this theory is leading; its proponents would
make us conclude that being-in-itself is full positivity and
does not contain in itself any negation. This negative judg-
ment, on the other hand, by virtue of being a subjective act,
is strictly identified with the affirmative judgment. They can
not see that Kant, for example, has distinguished in its in-
ternal texture the negative act of judgment from the affirma-
tive act. In each case a synthesis of concepts is operative;
that synthesis, which is a concrete and full event of psychic
life, is operative here merely in the manner of the copula “is”
and there in the manner of the copula “is not.” In the same
way the manual operation of sorting out (separation) and the
manual operation of assembling (union) are two objective
conducts which possess the same reality of fact. Thus negation
would be “at the end” of the act of judgment without, how-
ever, being “in” being. It is like an unreal encompassed by
two full realities neither of which claims . it; being-in-itself,
questioned about negation, refers to judgment, since being
is only what it is — and judgment, a wholly psychic positivity,
refers to being since judgment formulates a negation which
concerns being and which consequently is transcendent
Negation, the result of concrete psychic operations, is sup-
ported in existence by these very operations and is incapable
of existing by itself; it has the existence of a noema-corre-
iate; its esse resides exactly in its percipi. Nothingness, the
conceptual unity of negative judgments, can not have the
38 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
slightest trace of reality, save that which the Stoics confer on
their “lecton.”’^ Can we accept this concept?
The question can be put in these terms: Is negation as the
structure of the judicative proposition at the origin of
nothingness? Or on the contrary is nothingness as the
ture of the real, the origin and foundation of negation?
Thus the problem of being had referred us first to that of
the question as a human attitude, and the problem of the
question now refers us to that of the being of negation.
It is evident that non-being always appears within the
limits of a human expectation. It is because I expect to find
fifteen hundred francs that I find only thirteen hundred. It is
because a physicist expects a certain verification of his
hypothesis that nature can tell him no. It would be in vain to
deny that negation appears on the original basis of a relation
of man to the world. The world does not disclose its non-
beings to one who has not first posited them as possibilities.
But is this to say that these non-beings are to be reduced to
pure subjectivity? Does this mean to say that we ought to give
them the importance and the type of existence of the Stoic
“lecton,” of Husserl’s noema? We think not
First it is not true that negation is only a quality of
judgment. The question is formulated by an interrogative
judgment, but it is not itself a judgment; it is a pre-
judicative attitude. I can question by a look, by a ges-
ture.^ In posing a question I stand facing being in a
certain way and this relation to being is a relation of
being; the judgment is only one optional expression of it
At the same time it is not necessarily a person whom the
questioner questions about being; this conception of the ques-
tion by making of it an intersubjective phenomenon, detaches
, it from the being to which it adheres and leaves it in the
air as pure modality of dialogue. On the contrary, we must
consider the question in dialogue to be only a particular
species of the genus “question”; the being in question is not
necessarily a thinking being. If my car breaks down, it is the
carburetor , the spark plugs, etc., that I question. If my watch
stops, ^ I can question the watchmaker about the cause of the
stopping, but it is the various mechanisms of the watch that
the Watchmaker will in turn question. What I expect
from the^ carburetor, what the watchmaker expects from
Tr. An abstraction or something with purely nominal existence — like
space or time.
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
39
the works of the watch, is BOt a judgment; it is a dis-
closure of being on the basis of which we can make a judg-
ment. And if I expect a disclosure of being, I am prepared at
the same time for the eventuality of a disclosure of a non-
being. If I question the carburetor, it is because I consider it
possible that “there is nothing there*' in the carburetor. Thus
my question by its nature envelops a certain pre-judicative
comprehension of non-being; it is in itself a relation of being
with non-being, on the basis of the original transcendence;
that is, in a relation of being with being.
Moreover if the proper nature of the question is obscured
by the fact that questions are frequently put by one man to
other men, it should be pointed out here that there are
numerous non-judicative conducts which present this im-
mediate comprehension of non-being on the basis of being —
in its original purity. If, for example, we consider destruction,
we must recognize that it is an activity which doubtless could
utilize judgment as an instrument but which can not be de-
fined as uniquely or even primarily judicative. “Destruction”
presents the same structure as “the question.” In a sense, cer-
tainly, man is the only being by whom a destruction can be
accomplished. A geological plication, a storm do not destroy
— or at least they do not destroy directly; they merely modify
the distribution of masses of beings. There is no less
after the storm than before. There is something else. Even this
expression is improper, for to posit otherness there must be
a witness who can retain the past in some manner and com-
pare it to the present in the form of no longer. In the absence
of this witness, there is being before as after the storm — that
is all. If a cyclone can bring about the death of certain living
beings, this death will be destruction only if it is experienced
as such. In order for destruction to exist, there must be first
a relation of man to being — i.e., a transcendence; and within
the limits of this relation, it is necessary that man apprehend
one being. as destructible. This supposes a limiting cutting
mto being by a being, which, as we saw in connection with
mth, is already a process of nihilation. The being under con-
nderation is that and outside of that nothing. The gunner who
has been assi^ed an objective carefully points his gun in a
certain direction excluding all others. But even this would
still be nothing unless the being of the gunner’s objective is
revealed^ as fragile. And what is fragility if not a certain
probability of non-being for a given being under determined
40 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
circumstances. A being is fragile if it carries in its_ bemg a
definite possibility of non-being. But once again it is
through man that fragUity comes into being, for the mdivid-
ualizing limitation which we mentioned earlier is the condi-
tion of fragility; one being is fragile and not all being, for
the latter is beyond all possible destruction. Thus the relation
of individualizing limitation which man enters into with one
being on the original basis of his relation to being causes
fragility to enter into this being as the appearance of a per-
manent possibility of non-being. But this is not all. In order
for destructibility to exist, man must determine himself in
the face of this possibility of non-being, either positively or
negatively; he must either take the necessary measures^ to
realize it (destruction proper) or, by a negation of non-being,
to maintain it always on the level of a simple possibility (by
preventive measures). Thus it is man who renders cities de-
structible, precisely because he posits them as fragile and as
precious and because he adopts a system of protective meas-
ures with regard to them. It is because of this ensemble of
measures that an earthquake or a volcanic eruption can de-
stroy these cities or these human constructions. The original
meaning and aim of war are contained in the smallest building
of man. It is necessary then to recognize that destruction is
an essentially human thing and that it is man who destroys
his cities through the agency of earthquakes or directly, who
destroys his ships through the agency of cyclones or directly.
But at the same time it is necessary to acknowledge that
destruction supposes a pre-judicative comprehension of
nothingness as such and a conduct in the face of nothingness.
In addition destruction, although coming into being through
man, is an objective fact and not a thought Fragility has
been impressed upon the very being of this vase, and its de-
struction would be an irreversible absolute event which I could
only verify. There is a transphenomenality of non-being as of
being. The examination of “destruction” leads us then to the
same results as the examination of “the question.”
But if we wish to decide with certainty, we need only to
consider an example of a negative judgment and to ask our-
selves whether it causes non-being to appear at the '■heart of
being or merely limits itself to determining a prior revelation.
I have an appointment with Pierre at four o’clock. I arrive
^ quarter of an hour late. Pierre is always punctual.
WiU he have waited for me? I look at the room, the patrons.
41
r
? . THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
[ and I say, “He is not here.” Is there an intuition of Pierre’s
' absence, or does negation indeed enter in only with judgment?
At first sight it seems absurd to speak here of intuition since
to be exact there could not be an intuition of nothing and
since the absence of Pierre is this nothing.^ Popular con-
sciousness, however, bears witness to this intuition. Do we not
■ say, for example, “I suddenly saw that he was not there.”
Is this just a matter of misplacing the negation? Let us look a
little closer.
It is certain that the cafe by itself with its patrons, its
tables, its booths, its- mirrors, its light, its smoky atmosphere,
and the sounds of voices, rattling saucers, and footsteps which
fill it— the cafe is a fullness of being. And all the intuitions
of detail which I can have are filled by these odors, these
sounds, these colors, all phenomena which have a trans-
phenomenal being. Similarly Pierre’s actual presence in a
place which I do not know is also a plenitude of being. We
seem to have found fullness everywhere. But we must observe
that in perception there is always the construction of a figure
on a ground. No one object, no group of objects is especially
designed to be organized as specifically either ground or
figure; all depends on the direction of my attention. When I
enter this caf4 to search for Pierre, there is formed a synthetic
organization of all the objects in the cafe, on the ground of
which Pierre is given as about to appear. This organization of
the cafe as the ground is an original nihilation. Each element
of the setting, a person, a table, a chair, attempts to isolate
itself, to lift itself upon the ground constituted by the totality
of the other objects, only to fall back once more into the
, nndifferentiation of this ground; it melts into the ground. For
fte ground is that which is seen only in addition, that which
object of a purely marginal attention. Thus the original
nihfiation of all the fibres which appear and are swallowed
Up in the total neutrality of a ground is the necessary condi-
lon for the appearance of the principle figure, which is here
e person of Pierre. This nihilation is given to my intuition;
' successive disappearance of all the objects
, nich I look at— in particular of the faces, which detain me
r an instant (Could this be Pierre?) and which as quickly
because they “are not” the face of
triit 5 or, ®^®^beless if I should finally discover Pierre, my in-
would be filled by a solid element, I should be sud-
42 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
denly arrested by his face and the whole caf6 would organ-
ize itself around him as a discrete presence.
But now Pierre is not here. This does not mean that I
discover his absence in some precise spot in the establishment.
In fact Pierre is absent from the whole cafe; his absence fixes
the cafe in its evanescence; the cafe remains ground; it persists
in offering itself as an undifferentiated totality to my only
marginal attention; it slips into the background; it pursues its
nihilation. Only it makes itself ground . for a determined
figure; it carries the figure everywhere in front of it, presents
the figure everywhere to me. This figure which slips constantly
between my look and the solid, real objects of the cafe is
precisely a perpetual disappearance; it is Pierre raising him-
self as nothingness on the ground of the nihilation of the
cafe. So that what is offered to intuition is a flickering of
nothingness; it is the nothingness of the ground, the nihila-
tion of which summons and demands the appearance of the
figure, and it is the figure — the nothingness which slips as a
nothing to the surface of the ground. It serves as foundation
for the judgment — “Pierre is not here.” It is in fact the
intuitive apprehension of a double nihilation. To be sure
Pierre’s absence supposes an original relation between me and
this caf6; there is an infinity of people who are without any
relation with this cafe for want of a real expectation which
establishes their absence. But, to be exact, I myself expected to
see Pierre, and my expectation has caused the absence of
Pierre to happen as a real event concerning this cafd. It is an
objective fact at present that I have discovered this absence,
and it presents itself as a synthetic relation between Pierre and
the setting in which I am looking for him. Pierre absent
haunts this cafe and is the condition of its self-nihilating
organization as ground. By contrast, judgments which I can
make subsequently to amuse myself, such as, “Wellington is
not in this cafe, Paul Valery is no longer here, etc ." — these
have a purely abstract meaning; they are pure applications
of the principle of negation without real or efficacious founda-
tion, and they never succeed in establishing a real relation^
between the cafe and Wellington or Vale^}^ Here the rela-/
tion “is not” is merely thought. This example is sufficient'
to show that non-being does not come to things by a negative
judgment; it is the negative judgment, on the contrary, which
is conditioned and supported by non-being.
How could it be otherwise? How could we even con-
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
43
ceive of the negative form of judgment if all is plenitude of
.being and positivity? We believed for a moment that the
negation could arise from the comparison instituted between
the result anticipated and the result obtained. But let us look
at that comparison. Here is an original judgment, a concrete,
positive psychic act which establishes a fact: “There are
1300 francs in my wallet.” Then there is another which is
something else, no longer it but an establishing, of- fact and
an afBrmation: “I expected to find 1500 francs.” There
we have real and objective facts, psychic, and positive events,
affirmative judgments. Where are we to place negation? Are
we to believe that it is a pure and simple application of a
category? And do we wish to hold that the mind in itself
possesses the not as a form of sorting out and separation?
But in this case we remove even the slightest suspicion of
negativity from the negation. If we admit that the category of
the “not” which exists in fact in the mind and is a positive
and concrete process to brace and systematize our knowledge,
if we admit &st that it is suddenly released by the presence
in us of certain affirmative judgments and then that it comes
suddenly to mark with its seal certain thoughts which result
from these judgments — ^by these considerations we will have
carefully stripped negation of all negative function. For nega-
tion is a refusal of existence. By means of it a being (or a way
of being) is posited, then thrown back to nothingness. If
negation is a category, if it is only a sort of plug set in-
differently on certain judgments, then how will we explain
the fact that it can nihilate a being, cause it suddenly to arise,
and then appoint it to be thrown back to non-being? If
prior judgments establish fact, like those which we have taken
for examples, negation must be like a free discovery, it must
tear us away from this wall of positivity which encircles
ys. Negation is an abrupt break in continuity which can not
in any case result from prior affirmations; it is an original and
ureducible event. Here we are in the realm of consciousness.
Consciousness moreover can not produce a negation except
in the form of consciousness of negation. No category can
mhabit” consciousness and reside there in the manner of a
thing.^ The not, as an abrupt intuitive discovery, appears as
consciousness (of being), consciousness of the not. In a word,
being is everywhere, it is not only Nothingness which, as
ergson maintains, is inconceivable; for negation will never
e denved from being. The necessary condition for our saying
44 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
not is that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and outside
of us, that nothingness haunt being.
But where does nothingness come from? If it is the
original condition of the questioning attitude and more gen-
erally of all philosophical or scientific inquiry, what is the
original relation of the human being to nothingness? What
is the original nihilating conduct?
m. THE dialectical concept of
NOTHINGNESS
It is still too soon for us to hope to disengage the meaning
of this nothingness, against which the question has suddenly
thrown us. But there are several conclusions which we can
formulate even now. In particular it would be worthwhile to
determine the relations between being and that non-being
which haunts it. We have established a certain parallelism
between the types of conduct man adopts in the face of being
and those which he maintains in the face of Nothingness,
and we are immediately tempted to consider being and non-
being as two complementary components of the real — ^like
dark and light. In short we would then be dealing with two
strictly contemporary notions which would somehow be united
in the production of existents and which it would be useless
to consider' in isolation. Pure being and pure non-being would
be two abstractions which could be reunited only on the basis
of concrete realities.
Such is certainly the point of view of Hegel. It is in the
Logic in fact that he studies the relations of Being and Non-
Being, and he calls the Logic “The system of the pure de-
terminations of thought,” He defines more fully by saying,
“Thoughts as they are ordinarily represented, are not pure
thoughts, for by a being which is thought, we understand
a being of which the content is an empirical content. In logic
thoughts are apprehended in such a way that they have no
other content than the content of pure thought, which con-
tent is engendered by it.”^ To be sure, these determination^
are “what is deepest in things” but at the same time when one
considers them “in and for themselves,” one deduces them
from thought itself and discovers in them their truth. How-
J Introduction, v. E. c. 2 cd. E. §xxiv, quoted by Lefebvre: Morceaux
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
45
ever the effort of Hegelian logic is to “make clear the in-
adequacy of the notions (which it) considers one by one and
the necessity, m order to understand them, of raising each to
' a more complete notion which surpasses them while in-
tegrating them.”*
One can apply to Hegel what Le Senne said of the philoso-
phy of Hamelin: “Each of the lower terms depends on the
higher term, as the abstract on the concrete which is
necessary for it to realize itself.” The true concrete for Hegel
is the Existent with its essence; it is the Totality produced by
the synthetic integration of all the abstract moments which
'are surpassed in it by requiring their complement In this
sense Being will be the most abstract of abstractions and the
poorest, if we consider it in itself — ^that is, by separating it
from its surpassing toward Essence. In fact “Being is related
to Essence as the immediate to the mediate. Things in general
‘are,’ but their being consists in manifesting their essence.
Being passes into Essence. One can express this by saying,
‘Being presupposes Essence.’ Although Essence appears in
relation to Being as mediated, Essence is nevertheless the true
origin. Being returns to its ground; Being is surpassed in
Essence.”^
Thus Being cut from Essence which is its ground becomes
“mere empty immediacy.” This is how the Phenomenology
of Mind defines it by presenting pure Being “from the point
of view of truth” as the immediate. If the beginning of logic
is to be the immediate, we shall then find beginning in
Being, ^ which is ’ “the indetermination which precedes all
determination, the undetermined as the absolute point of
departure,”
But Being thus undetermined immediately “passes into”
its opposite. “This pure Being,” writes Hegel in Logic (of the
Encylopaedia) , is “pure abstraction and consequently absolute
neption, which taken in its immediate moment is also non-
being.” Is Nothingness not in fact simple identity with itself,
complete emptiness, absence of determinations and of con-
tent? Pure being and pure nothingness are then the same
thmg. Or rather it is true to say that they are different; but
as here the difference is not yet a determined difference —
^ de V Abstraction, p. 25 (Presses Universitaires,
betweea 1808 and 1811, to serve
c asis for his course at the gymnasium at Nuremberg.
46 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
for being and non-being constitute the immediate moment
such as it is in them—this difference can not be named; it
is only a pure opinion.”® This means concretely that 'Hhere
is nothing in heaven or on earth which does not contain in
itself being and nothingness.”^
It is still too soon for us to discuss the Hegelian concept
itself; we need all the results of our study in order to take a
position regarding this. It is appropriate here to observe
only that being is reduced by Hegel to a signification of
the existent. Being is enveloped by essence, which is its
foundation and origin. Hegel’s whole theory is based on the
idea that a philosophical procedure is necessary in order at
the outset of logic to rediscover the immediate in terms of
the mediated, the abstract in terms of the concrete on which
it is grounded. But we have already remarked that being
does not hold the same relation to the phenomenon as the
abstract holds to the concrete. Being is not one “structure
among others,” one moment of the object; it is the very
condition of all structures and of all moments. It is the
ground on which the characteristics of the phenomenon will
manifest themselves. Similarly it is not admissible that the
being of things “consists in manifesting their essence.” For
then a being of that being would be necessary. Furthermore ,if
the being of things “consisted” in manifesting their essence,
it would be hard to see how Hegel could determine a pure
moment of Being where we could not find at least a trace of
that original structure. It is true that the understanding de-
termines pure being, isolates and fixes it in its very deter-
mmations. But if surpassing toward essence constitutes the
original character of being, and if the understanding
is limited to “determining and persevering in the determina-
tions,” we can not see precisely how it does not determine
being as “consisting in manifesting.”
It might be said in defense of Hegel that every determina-
tion is negation. But the understanding in this sense is lim-
ited to denying that its object is other than it is. That is
suflScient doubtless to prevent all dialectical process, but not
enough to effect its disappearance at the threshold of its sur-
passing. In so far as being surpasses itself toward something
else, it is not subject to the determinations of the under-
standing. But in so far as it surpasses itself — ^that is, in so far
® Hegel, P. c. E, 988.
® Hegel: Greater Logic, chap. I.
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
47
as it is in its very depths the origin of its own surpassing —
being must on the contrary appear such as it is to the under-
standing which fixes it in its own determinations. To affirm
that being is only what it is would be at least to leave being
intact so far as it is its own surpassing. We see here the am-
biguity of the Hegelian notion of “surpassing” which some-
times appears to be an upsurge from the inmost depth of^the
being considered and at other times an external movement by
wWch this being is involved. It is not enough to affirm that
the understanding finds in being only what it is; we must also
explain how being, which is what it is, can be only that. Such
an explanation would derive its legitimacy from the considera-
tion of the phenomenon of being as such and not from the
negating process of the understanding.
' But what needs examination here is especially Hegel’s
statement that being and nothingness constitute two opposites,
the difference between which on the level of abstraction
under consideration is only a simple “opinion.”
To oppose being to nothingness as thesis and antithesis,
as Hegel does, is to suppose that they are logically contem-
porary. Thus simultaneously two opposites arise as the two
limiting terms of a logical series. Here we must note carefully
that opposites alone can enjoy this simultaneity because they
are equally positive (or equally negative). But non-being is
not the opposite of being; it is its contradiction. This implies
that logically nothingness is subsequent to being since it is
being, first posited, then denied. It can not be therefore that
beiag and non-being are concepts with the same content since
on the contrary non-being supposes an irreducible mental act
Whatever may be the original undifferentiation of being, non-
being is that same undifferentiation denied. This permits
Hegel to make being pass into nothingness; this is what by
implication has introduced negation into his very definition of
^ing. This is self-evident since any definition is negative, since
Hegel has told us, making use of a statement of Spinoza’s,
that omnis determinatio est negatio. And does he not write,
h' matter what the determination or content is
which would distinguish being from something else; whatever
womd^ give it a content would prevent it from maintaining
T purity. It is pure indetermination and emptiness,
be apprehended in it.”
Thus anyone who introduces negation into being from
48 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
outside will discover subsequently that he makes it pass into
non-being. But here we have a play on words involving the
very idea of negation. For if I refuse to allow being any
determination or content, I am nevertheless forced to affirm
at least that it is. Thus, let anyone deny being whatever he
wishes, he can not cause it not to be, thanks to the very fact
that he denies that it is this or that. Negation can not touch
the nucleus of being of Being, which is absolute plenitude
and entire positivity. By contrast Non-being is a negation
which aims at this nucleus of absolute density. Non-being
is denied at the heart of Being. When Hegel writes, “(Being
and nothingness) are empty abstractions, and the one is as
empty as the other,”’' he forgets that emptiness is emptiness
of something.® Being is empty of all other determination than
identity with itself, but non-being is empty of being. In a
word, we must recall here against Hegel that being is and
that nothingness is not.
Thus even though being can not be the support of any
differentiated quality, nothingness is logically subsequent to
it since it supposes being in order to deny it, since the irre-
ducible quality of the not comes to add itself to that undiffer-
entiated mass of being in order to release it. That does not
mean only that we should refuse to put being and non-being
on the same plane, but also that we must be careful never to
posit nothingness as an original abyss from which being arose.
The use which we make of the notion of nothingness in its
familiar form always supposes a preliminary specification
of being. It is striking in this connection that language fur-
nishes us with a nothingness of things and a nothingness of
human beings.® But the specification is, still more obvious in
the majority of instances. We say, pointing to a particular
collection of objects, “Touch nothing” which means, very
precisely, nothing of that collection. Similarly, if we ques-
tion someone on well-determined events in his private or
public life, he may reply, “I know nothing.” And this nothing
includes the totality of the facts on which we questioned him.
^ P. c. 2 cd. E. §Lxxxvii.
® It is so much the more strange in that Hegel is the first to have noted
that “every negation is a determined negation”; that is, it depends on a
content.
« ” ~ as opposed to ne . . . personne =
nobody,” which are equally fundamental negative expressions. Sartre here
convemcntly has based his ontology on the exigencies of a purely French
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
49
Even Socrates with his famous statement, “I know that I
know nothing,” designates by this nothing the totality of
being considered as Truth.
If adopting for. the moment the point of view of naive
cosmogonies, we tried to ask ourselves what “was there”
before a world existed, and if we replied “nothing,” we
would be forced to recognize that this “before” like this
“nothing” is in effect retroactive. What we deny today, we
who are established in being, is what there was of being be-
fore this being. Negation here springs from a consciousness
which is turned back toward the beginning. If we remove
from this original emptiness its characteristic of being empty
of this world and of every whole taking the form of a world,
as well as its characteristic of before, which presupposes an
after, then the veiy negation disappears, giving way to a total
indetermination which it would be impossible to conceive,
even and especially as a nothingness. Thus reversing the
statement of Spinoza, we could say that every negation is
determination. This means that being is prior to nothingness
and establishes the ground for it By this we must understand
not only that being has a logical precedence over nothingness
but also that it is from being that nothingness derives con-
cretely its efficacy. This is what we mean when we say that
nothingness haunts being. That means that being has no
need of nothingness in order to be conceived and that we
can examine the idea of it exhaustively without finding there
the least trace of nothingness. But on the other hand,
nothingness, which is not, can have only a borrowed existence,
and it gets its being from being. Its nothingness of being is
encountered only within the limits of being, and the total
disappearance of being would not be the advent of the reign
of non-being, but on the contrary the concomitant disappear-
ance of nothingness. Non-being exists only on the surface of
being.
IV. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONCEPT
OF NOTHINGNESS
There is another possible way of conceiving being and
nothingness as complements. One could view them as two
equally necessary components of the real without making
being “pass into” nothingness — ^as Hegel does — and without
so BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
insisting on the posteriority of nothingness as we attempted
to do. We might on the contrary emphasize the reciprocal
forces of repulsion which being and non-being exercise on
each other, the real in some way being the tension resulting
from these antagonistic forces. It is toward this new concep-
tion that Heidegger is oriented.”
We need not look far to sec the progress which Hei-
degger’s theory of nothingness has made over that of Hegel.
First, being and non-being are no longer empty abstractions.
Heidegger in his most important work has shown the legiti-
macy of raising the question concerning being; the latter has
no longer the character of a Scholastic universal which it still
retained with Hegel. There is a meaning of being which must
be clarified; there is a “pro-ontological comprehension” of
being which is involved in every kind of conduct belonging
to human reality” — i.e., in each of its projects. Similarly
difficulties which customarily arise as soon os a philosopher
touches on the problem of Nothingness are shown to be with-
out foundation; they are important in so far as they limit the
function of the understanding, and they .show simply that
this problem is not within the province of the understand-
ing. There exist on the other hand numerous attitudes of
“human reality” which imply a “comprehension” of nothing-
ness: hate, prohibitions, regret, etc. For Dasein there is
even a permanent possibility of finding oneself “face to face”
with nothingness and discovering it as a phenomenon: this
possibility is anguish.
Heidegger, while establishing the possibilities of a^ con-
crete apprehension of Nothingness, never falls into the error
which Hegel made; he does not preserve a being for Non-
Being, not even an abstract being. Nothing is not; it nihilates
itself.i^ It is supported and conditioned by transcendence. We
know that for Heidegger the being of human reality is de-
fined as “being-in-the-world.” The world is a synthetic cora-
^0 Heidegger, Qu’ cst.ee que la metaphysique. (Translated by Corbin. Paris;
GaUimard. 1938.) [“What Is Metaphysics?" Translated by R. F. C. Hull and
Alan Crick. From Existence and Being, cd. by Werner Brock. Chicago:
Henry Regncry. 1949.]
“Tr. Heidegger uses the by now famous expression "Das Nlchts nichict"
or "Nothing nothings." I think “nIhUatc” Is a closer equivalent to Sartre's
ndantlse than “annihilate" because the fundamental meaning of die term
is “to make nothing” rather than “to destroy or do aw.ay with.” Nlchtet,
n£antise, and nihilate are all, of course, equally without foundation in die
oictionanes of the respective languages.
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
51
plex of instrumental realities inasmuch as they point one to
another in ever widening circles, and inasmuch as man makes
himself known in terms of this complex which he is. This
means both that “human reality” springs forth invest^ with
being and “finds itself” {sich befinden) in being — and also
that, human reality causes being, which surrounds it, to be
disposed around human reality in the form of the world.
But human reality can make being appear as organized
totality in tbe world only by surpassing being. All determina-
tion for Heidegger is surpassing since it supposes a with-
drawal taken from a particular point of view. This passing
beyond the world, which is a condition of the very rising up
of the world as such, is effected by the Dasein which directs
the surpassing toward itself. The characteristic of selfness
(Selbstheit) t in fact, is that man is always separated from
what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not.
He makes himself known to himself from the other side of
the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to
recover his inner being. Man is “a being of distances.” In
the movement of turning inward which traverses all of being,
being arises and organizes itself as the world without there
being either priority of the movement over the world, or the
world over the movement. But this appearance of the self
beyond the world — that is, beyond the totality of the real —
is an emergence of “human reality” in nothingness. It is in
nothingness alone that being can be surpassed. At the same
time it is from the point of view of beyond the world that
being is organized into the world, which means on the one
hand that human reality rises up as an emergence of being in
non-being and on the other hand that the world is “suspended”
in nothingness. Anguish is the discovery of this double,
perpetual nihilation. It is in terms of this surpassing of the
world that Dasein manages to realize the contingency of
the world; that is, to raise the question, “How does it happen
that there is something rather than nothing?” Thus the con-
tingency of the world appears to human reality in so far as
human reality has established itself in nothingness in order to
apprehend the contingency.
Here then is nothingness surrounding being on every
side and at the same time expelled from being. Here nothing-
ness is given as that by which the world receives its outlines
as the world. Can this solution satisfy us?
Certainly it can not be denied that the apprehension of
52 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the world qua world is a nihilation. From the moment the
world appears qua world it gives itself as being only that.
The necessary counterpart of this apprehension then xs indeed
the emergence of “human reality’* in nothingness. But where
does “human reality” get its power of emerging thus in non-
being? Without a doubt Heidegger is right in insisting^ on
the fact that negation derives its foundation from nothing-
ness. But if nothingness provides a ground for negation, it is
because nothingness envelops the not within itself as its
essential structure. In otlier words, it is not as undiffer-
entiated emptiness or as a disguised otherness^- tlxat nothing-
ness provides the ground for negation. Nothingness stands
at the origin of the negative judgment because it is itself
negation. It founds the negation as an act because it is
the negation as being. Nothingness can be nothingness only
by nihilating itself expressly as nothingness of the world;
that is, in its nihilation it must direct itself expressly toward
this world in order to constitute itself as refusal of the world.
Nothingness carries being in its heart But how does the
emergence account for this nihilating refusal? Transcendence,
which is “the pro-ject of self beyond,” is far from being
able to establish nothingness; on the contrary, it is nothing-
ness which is at the very heart of transcendence and which
conditions it.
Now the characteristic of Heidegger’s philosophy is to
describe Dasein by using positive terms which hide the im-
plicit negations. Dasein is “outside of itself, in the world”;
it. is_ “a being of distances”; it is care; it is “its own possi-
bilities,” etc. All this amounts to saying that Dasein “is not”
in itself, that it “is not” in immediate proximity to itself,
and that it “surpasses” the world inasmuch as it posits itself
as not being in itself and as not being the world. In this
sense Hegel is right rather than Heidegger when he states
that Mind is the negative. Actually we can put to each of
them the same question, phrased slightly differently. We
should say to Hegel: “It is not sufficient to posit mind as
mediation and the negative; it is necessary to demonstrate
negativity as the structure of being of mind. What must mind
be in order to be able to constitute itself as negative?” And
we can ask the same question of Heidegger in these words:
It negation is the original structure of transcendence, what
“What Hegel would call “immediate otherness.”
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
53
must be the original stracture of ‘human reality’ in order for
it to be able to transcend the world?” In both cases we are
shown a negating activity and there is no concern to ground
this activity upon a negative being. Heidegger in addition
makes of Nothingness a sort of intentional correlate of tran-
scendence, without seeing that he has already inserted it into
transcendence itself as its original structure.
Furthermore what is the use of affirming that Nothing-
ness provides the ground for negation, if it is merely to enable
us to form subsequently a theory of non-being which by
definition separates Nothingness from all concrete negation?
If I emerge in nothingness beyond the world, how can this
extra-mundane nothingness furnish a foundation for those
little pools of non-being which we encounter each instant in
the depth of being. I say, “Pierre is not there,” “I have no
more money,” etc. Is it really necessary to surpass the world
toward nothingness and to return subsequently to being in
order to provide a ground for these everyday judgments?
And how can the operation be affected? To accomplish it we
are not required to make the world slip into nothingness;
standing within the limits of being, we simply deny an attri-
bute to a subject. 'Will someone say that each attribute re-
fused, each being denied is taken up by one and the same
extra-mundane' nothingness, that non-being is like the fullness
of what is not, that the world is suspended in non-being as
the real is suspended in the heart of possibilities? In this case
each negation would necessarily have for origin a particular
surpassiug: the surpassing of one being toward another. But
vihat is this surpassing, if not simply the Hegelian mediation
— and have we not already and in vain sought in Hegel the
uihilating ground of the mediation? Furthermore even if the
explanation is valid for the simple, radical negations which
deny to a determined object any kind of presence in the
depth of being (e.g., “Centaurs do not exist” — “There is
no reason for him to be late” — ^“The ancient Greeks
did not practice polygam}^’), negations which, if need be,
can contribute to constituting Nothingness as a sort of geo-
metrical place for unfulfilled projects, all inexact representa-
tions, all vanished beings or those of which the idea is only a
fiction even so this interpretation of non-being would no
longer be valid for a certain kind of reality which is in truth
the most frequent: namely, those negations which include
non-being in their being. How can we hold that these are at
54
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
once partly within the universe and partly outside in extra-
mundane nothingness? ' ^
Take for example the notion of distance, which condi-"
tions the determination of a location, the localization of a
point. It is easy to see that it possesses a negative moment
Two points are distant when they are separated by a certain’
length. The length, a positive attribute of a segment of a
straight line, intervenes here by virtue of the negation of an
absolute, undifferentiated proximity. Someone might perhaps
seek to reduce distance to being only the length of the seg-
ment of which the two points considered, A and B, would be
the limits. But does he not see that he has changed the direc-
tion of attention in this case and that he has, under cover of
the same word, given another object to intuition? The or-
ganized complex which is constituted by the segment with
its two limiting terms can furnish actually two different
objects to knowledge. We can in fact give the segment as
immediate object of intuition, in which case this segment
represents a full, concrete tension, of which the length is a
positive attribute and the two points A and B appear only as
a moment of the whole; that is, as they are implicated by the
segment itself as its limits. Then the negation, expelled from
the segment and its length, takes refuge in the two limits: to
say that point B is a limit of the segment is to say that the
segment does not extend beyond this point. Negation is
here a secondary structure of the object. If, on the other
hand, we direct our attention to the two points A and B, they
arise as immediate objects of intuition on the ground of
space. The segment disappears as a full, concrete object; it is
apprehended in terms of two points as the emptiness, the
negativity which separates them. Negation is not subject to
the points, which cease to be limits in order to impregnate
the very length of the segment with distance. Thus the total
form constituted by the segment and its two limits with its
inner structure of negation is capable of letting itself be
apprehended in two ways. Rather there are two forms, and the
condition of the appearance of the one is the disintegration of
the other, exactly as in perception we constitute a particular
object as a figure by rejecting another so as to make of it a
ground, and conversely. In both instances we find the same
quantity of negation which at one time passes into the notion
of limits and at another into the notion of distance, but
which m.each case can not be suppressed. Will someone
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
55
object that the idea of distance is psychological and that
it designates only the extension which must be cleared in
order to go from point A to point B? We shall reply that
the same negation is included in this to clear since this no-
tion expresses precisely the passive resistance of the remote-
ness. We will willingly admit with Heidegger that “human
reality” is “remote-from-itself”; that is, that it rises in the
world as that which creaites distances and at the same time
causes them to be removed {ent-f emend) . But this remote-
ness-from-self, even if it is the necessary condition in order
that there may be remoteness in general, envelops remoteness
in itself as the negative structure which must be surmounted.
It will be useless to attempt to reduce distance to the simple
result of a measurement. What has become evident in the
course of the preceding discussion is that the two points and
the segment which is enclosed between them have the indissol-
uble unity of what the Germans call a Gestalt. Negation is the
cement which realizes this unity. It defines precisely the
immediate relation which connects these two points and
which presents them to intuition as the indissoluble unity of
the distance. This negation can be covered over only by claim-
ing to reduce distance to the measurement of a length, for
negation is the raison d’etre of that measurement.
What we have just shown by the examination of distance,
we could just as well have brought out by describing realities
like absence, change, otherness, repulsion, regret, distraction,
etc. There is an infinite number of realities which are not
only objects of judgment, but which are experienced,
opposed, feared, etc., by the human being and which in their
inner structure are inhabited by negation, as by a nec-
essary condition of their existence. We shall call them
Jiegatites.'^^ Kant caught a glimpse of their significance when
be spoke of regulative concepts (c.g. the immortality of the
soul), types of syntheses of negative and positive in which
negation is the condition of positivity. The function of nega-
tion varies according to the nature of the object considered.
Between wholly positive realities (which however retain ne-
^tion as the condition of the sharpness of their outlines, as
that which fixes them as what they are) and those in which
the positivity is only an appearance concealing a hole of
nothmgness, all gradations are possible. In any case it is im-
possible to throw these negations back into an extra-mundane
“Tr. A word coined by Sartre 17101 no equivalent term in English.
56 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
nothingness since they are dispersed in being, are supported
by being, and are conditions of reality. Nothingness beyond the
world accounts for absolute negation; but we have just dis-
covered a swarm of ultra-mundane beings which possess as
much reality and efficacy as other beings, but which enclose
within themselves non-being. They recjuire an explanation
which remains within the limits of the real. Nothingness, if
it is supported by being, vanishes qua nothingness, and we
fall back upon being. Nothingness can be nihilated only on
the foundation of being; if nothingness can be given, it^ is
neither before nor after being, nor in a general way outside
of being. Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being— like a
worm.
V, THE ORIGIN OF NOTHINGNESS
It would be well at this point to cast a glance backward and
to measure the road already covered. We raised first the
question of being. Then examining this very question con-
ceived as a type of human conduct, we questioned this in
turn. We next had to recognize that no question could be
asked, in particular not that of being, if negation did not
exist. But this negation itself when inspected more closely
referred us back to Nothingness as its origin and foundation.
In order for negation to exist in the world and in order that
we may consequently raise questions concerning Being, it is
necessary that in some way Nothingness be given. We per-
ceived then that Nothingness can be conceived neither
outside of being, nor as a complementary, abstract notion,
nor as an infinite milieu where being is suspended. Nothing-
ness must be given at the heart of Being, in order for us
to be able to apprehend that particular type of. realities which
we have called negatites. But this intra-mundane Nothingness
can not be produced by Being-in-itself; the notion of Being
as full positivity does not contain Nothingness as one of its
structures. We can not even say that Being excludes it. Being
lacks all relation with it. Hence the question which is put to
us now with a particular urgency: if Nothingness can be
conceived neither outside of Being, nor in terms of Being, and
7 it is non-being, it can not derive
trom .Itself the necessary force to "nihilate itself,” where
does Nothingness come from?
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
57
If we wish to pursue the problem further, we must first
recognize that we can not grant to nothingness the property
of “nihilatihg itself.” For although the expression “to nihilate
itself” is thought of as removing from nothingness the last
semblance of being, we must recognize that only Being can
nihilate itself; however it comes about, in order to nihilate
itself, it must be. But Nothingness is not. If we can speak
of it, it is only because it possesses an appearance of being,
a borrowed being, as we have noted above. Nothingness is
not. Nothingness “is made-to-be,”^- Nothingness does not
nihilate itself; Nothingness “is nihilated.” It follows there-
fore that there must exist a Being (this can not be the In-
itself) of which the property is to nihilate Nothingness, to
support it in its being, to sustain it perpetually in its very
existence, a being by which nothingness comes to things. But
how can this Being be related to Nothingness so that through
it Nothingness comes to things? We must observe first that
the being postulated can not be passive in relation to
Nothingness, can not receive it; Nothingness could not come
to this being except through another Being — ^which would be
an infinite regress. But on the other hand, the Being by which
Nothingness comes to the world can not produce Nothing-
ness while remaining indififerent to that production — like the
Stoic cause which produces its effect without being itself
changed. It would be inconceivable that a Being which is
full positivity should maintain and create outside itself a
Nothingness or transcendent being, for there would be noth-
ing in Being by which Being could surpass itself toward Non-
Being. The Being by which Nothingness arrives in the world
must nihilate Nothingness in its Being, and even so it still
runs the risk of establishing Nothingness as a transcendent in
&e very heart of immanence unless it nihilates Nothingness
in its being in connection with its own being. The Being by
which Nothingness arrives in the world is a being such that
m its Being, the Nothingness of its Being is in question.
The being by which Nothingness comes to the world must be
The French is est Sti, which literally means “is been,” an expres-
sion as meaningless in ordinary French as in English. Maurice Natanson
snggests “is-was.” (A Critique of Jean-Foul Sartre’s Ontology. University
o Nebraska Studies. March 1951. p. 59.) I prefer “is made-to-be” because
artre seems to be using elre as a transitive verb, here in the passive voice,
m suggesting that nothingness has been subjected to an act involving
Other passages containing this expression will, I believe, bear out
wjs interpretation.
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
its own Nothingness. By this we must understand not a
nihilating act, which would require in turn a foundation in
Being, but an ontological characteristic of the Being required.
It remains to learn in what delicate, exquisite region of Being
we shall encounter that Being which is its own Nothingness.
We shall be helped in our inquiry by a more complete
examination of the conduct which served us as a point of
departure. We must return to the question. We have seen, it
may be recalled, that every question in essence posits the
possibility of a negative reply. In a question we question a
being about its being or its way of being. This way of
being or this being is veiled; there always remains the possi-
bility that it may unveil itself as a Nothingness, But from the
very fact that we presume that an Existent can always be re-
vealed as nothing, every question supposes that we realize a
nihilating withdrawal in relation to the given, which becomes
a simple presentation, fluctuating between being and Nothing-
ness.
It is essential therefore that the questioner have the
permanent possibility of dissociating himself from the causal
series which constitutes being and which can produce only
being. If we admitted that the question is determined in the
questioner by universal determinism, the question would
thereby become unintelligible and even inconceivable. A real
cause, in fact, produces a real effect and the caused being is
wholly engaged by the cause in positivity; to the extent that
its being depends on the cause, it can not have within itself
the tiniest germ of nothingness. Thus in so far as the ques-
tioner must be able to effect in relation to the questioned a
kind of nihilating withdrawal, he is not subject to the
causal order of the world; he detaches himself from Being.
This means that by a double movement of nihilation he nihi-
lates the thing questioned in relation to himself by placing it
in a neutral^ state, between being and non-being — and that he
nihilates himself in relation to the thing questioned by
WOTching himself from being in order to be able to bring out
of himself the possibility of a non-being! Thus in posing a
question a certain negative element is introduced into the
world. We see nothingness making the world iridescent,
casting a shimmer over things. But at the same time the ques-
tion emanates from a questioner who, in order to motivate
se^Som questions, disengages him-
rom being. This disengagement is then by definition a
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
59
human process. Man presents himself at least in this instance
as a being who causes Nothingness to arise in the world, inas-
much as he himself is affected with non-being to this end.
These remarks may serve as guiding thread as we examine
the negatites of which we spoke earlier. There is no doubt at
all that these are transcendent realities; distance, for example,
is imposed on us as something which we have to take into
account, which must be cleared with effort However these
realities are of a very peculiar nature; they will indicate im-
mediately an essential relation of human reality to the world.
They derive their origin from an act, an expectation, or a
project of the human being; they all indicate an aspect of
being as it appears to the human being who is engaged in the
world. The relations of man in the world, which the nigatites
indicate, have nothing in common with the relations a
posteriori which are brought out by empirical activity. We are
no longer dealing with those relations of instrumentality by
which, according to Heidegger, objects in the world disclose
themselves to “human reality.” Every negatiti appears rather
as one of the essential conations of this relation of instru-
mentality. In order for the totality of being to order itself
around us as instruments, in order for it to parcel itself into
differentiated complexes which refer one to another and which
can be used, it is necessary that negation rise up not as a thing
among other things but as the rubric of a category which
presides over the arrangement and the redistribution of great
masses of being in things. Thus the rise of man in the midst
of the being which “invests” him causes a world to be dis-
covered. But the essential and primordial moment of this rise
is the negation. Thus we have reached the first goal of this
study. Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to
the world. But this question imm ediately provokes another:
What must man be in his being in order that through him
nothingness may come to being?
Being can generate only being and if man is inclosed in
this process of generation, only being will come out of him.
we are to assume that man is able to question this process —
i-e., to make it the object of interrogation — he must be able
to hold it up to view as a totality. He must be able to put
himself outside of being and by the same stroke weaken the
structure of the being of being. Yet it is not given to “human
reality” to annihilate even provisionally the mass of being
which it posits before itself. Man’s relation with being is that
60 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
he can modify it. For man to put a particular existent out of
circuit is to put himself out of circuit in relation to that
existent. In this case he is not subject to it; he is out of reach;
it can not act on him, for he has retired beyond a nothingness.
Descartes following the Stoics has given a name to this popi-
bility which human reality has to secrete a nothingness which
isolates it — it is freedom. But freedom here is only a name.
If we wish to penetrate further into the question, we must
not be content with this reply and we ought to ask now,
What is human freedom if through it nothingness comes into
the world?
It is not yet possible to deal with the problem of freedom
in all its fullness.^® In fact the steps which we have completed
up to now show elearly that freedom is not a faculty of the
human soul to be envisaged and described in isolation.
\^at we have been trying to define is the being of man in
so far as he conditions the appearance of nothingness, and
this being has appeared to us as freedom. Thus freedom as
the requisite condition for the nihilation of nothingness is not
a property which belongs among others to the essence of the
human being. We have already noticed furthermore that
with man the relation of existence to essence is not compa-
rable to what it is for the things of the world. Human freedom
precedes essence in man and makes it possible; the essence of
the human being is suspended in his freedom. W’liat tve call
freedom is impossible to distinguish from the being of,-
“human reality.” Man does not exist first in order to be free ’
subsequently, there is no difference between the being of man
and his being-free. This is not tlic time to make a frontal
attack on a question which can be treated exhaustively only
in the light of a rigorous elucidation of the human being.
Here we are dealing with freedom in connection with tlje
problem of nothingness and only to the extent that it condi-
tions the appearance of nothingness.
What first appears evident is that human reality can de-
tach itself frotn the world — in questioning, in systematic
doubt, in sceptical doubt, in the e7rox?Jt etc . — only if by
nature it has the possibility of self-detachment. This W’as seen
y Descartes, who is establishing doubt on freedom when he
claims for us the possibility of suspending our judgments.
Alam s position is similar. It is also in this sense that Hegel
Cf, Part Four, Chapter one.
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
61
asserts the freedom of the mind to the degree that mind is
mediation — i.e., the Negative. Furthermore it is one of the
trends of contemporary philosophy to see in human con-
sciousness a sort of escape from the self; such is the meaning
of the transcendence of Heidegger. The intentionality of
Husserl and of Brentano has also to a large extent the charac-
teristic of a detachment from self. But we are not yet in a
position to consider freedom as an inner structure of con-
sciousness. We lack for the moment both instruments and
technique to permit us to succeed in that enterprise. What
interests us at present is a temporal operation since questioning
is, like doubt, a kind of behavior; it assumes that Ae human
being reposes first in the depths of being and then detaches
himself from it by a nihilating withdrawal. Thus we are en-
visaging the condition of the nihil ation as a relation to the
self in the heart of a temporal process. We wish simply to
show that by identifying consciousness with a causal sequence
indefinitely continued, one transmutes it into a plenitude of
being and thereby causes it to return into the unlimited
totality of being — as is well illustrated by the futility of the
efforts to dissociate psychological determinism from universal
determinism and to constitute it as a separate series.
The room of someone absent, the books of which he
turned the pages, the objects which he touched are in them-
selves only books, objects, i.e., full actualities. The very traces
which he has left can be deciphered as traces of him only
within a situation where he has been already posited as absent.
The dog-eared book with the well-read pages is not by itself
a book of which Pierre has turned the pages, of which he
no longer turns the pages. If we consider it as the present,
transcendent -motivation of my perception or even as the
^thetic flux, regulated by my sensible impressions, then it
is merely a volume with turned down, worn pages; it can refer
only to itself or to present objects, to the lamp which illumi-
nates it, to the table which holds it It would be useless to
invoke an association by contiguity as Plato does in the
Phaedo, where he makes the image of the absent one appear
on the margin of the perception of the lyre or of the cithara
which he has touched. This image, if we consider it in itself
and in the spirit of classical theories, is a definite plenitude;
It IS a concrete and positive psychic fact Consequently we
must of necessity pass on it a doubly negative judgment:
subjectively, to signify that the image is not a perception;
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
objectively, to deny that the Pierre of whom I form the image
is here at this moment.
This is the famous problem of the characteristics of the
true image, which has concerned so many psychologists from
Taine to Spaier. Association, we see, does not solve the prob-
lem; it pushes it back to the level of reflection. But in every
way it demands a negation; that is, at the very least a nihilat-
ing withdrawal of consciousness in relation to the irnage
apprehended as subjective phenomenon, in order to posit it
precisely as being only a subjective phenomenon.
Now I have attempted to show elsewhere^® that if we
posit the image first as a renascent perception, it is radically
impossible to distinguish it subsequently from actual per-
ceptions. The image must enclose in its very structure a nihilat-
ing thesis. It constitutes itself qua image while positing its
object as existing elsewhere or not existing. It carries within
it a double negation; first it is the nihilation of the world
(since the world is not offering the imagined object as an
actual object of perception), secondly the nihilation of the
object of the image (it is posited as not actual), and finally
by the same stroke it is the nihilation of itself (since it is not
a concrete, full psychic process). In explaining how I appre-
hend the absence of Pierre in the room, it would be useless to
invoke those famous “empty intentions” of Husserl, which
are in great part constitutive of perception. Among the various
perceptive intentions, indeed, there are relations of motiva-
tion (but motivation is not causation), and among these
intentions, some are full (f.e., filled with what they aim at)
and others empty. But precisely because the matter which
should fill the empty intentions does not exist, it can not be
this which motivates them in their structure. And since the
other intentions are full, neither can they motivate the empty
intentions inasmuch as the latter are empty. Moreover these
intentions are of psychic nature and it would be an error
to envisage them in the mode of things; that is, as recipients
which would first be given, which according to circum-
stances could be emptied or filled, and which would be by
nature indifferent to ^eir state of being empty or filled. It
seems that Husserl has not always escaped the materialist
lU^ion. To be empty an intention must be conscious of it-
self as empty and precisely as empty of the exact matter at
Paris: Alcan. 1936. Imagination: A Psychological Critique.
Translated hy Forrest Williams. Univ of Michigan Pre.ss. 1962.
I
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
63
which it aims. An empty intention constitutes itself as empty
to the exact extent that it posits its matter as. non-existing or
absent. In short an empty intention is a consciousness of nega-
tion which transcends itself toward an object which it posits
as absent or non-existent.
Thus whatever may be the explanation which we give of
it, Pierre’s absence, in order to be established or realized, re-
quires a negative moment 'by which consciousness, in the
absence of all prior determination, constitutes itself as nega-
tion. ff in terms of my perceptions of the room, I conceive
of the former inhabitant who is no longer in the room, I am
of necessity forced to produce an act of thought which no
prior state can determine nor motivate, in short to effect in
myself a break with being. And in so far as I continually use
nigatites to isolate and determine existents — i.e., to think them
— ^the succession of my “states of consciousness” is a perpetual
separation of effect from cause, since every nihilating process
must derive its source only from itself. Inasmuch as my pres-
ent state would be a prolongation of my prior state, every
opening by which negation could slip through would be com-
pletely blocked. Every psychic process of nihilation implies
then a cleavage between the immediate psychic past and the
present. This cleavage is precisely nothingness. At least, some-
one will say, there remains the possibility of successive implica-
tion between the nihilating processes. My establishment of
Pierre’s absence could still be determinant for my regret at
not seeing Mm; you have not excluded the possibility of a
determinism of nihilations. But aside from the fact that the
original nihilation of the series must necessarily be dis-
connected from the prior positive processes, what can be the
meaning of a motivation of nothingness by nothingness? A
being indeed can nihilate itself perpetually, but to the extent
diat it nihilates itself, it foregoes being the origin of another
phenomenon, even of a second niMlation.
It remains to explain what this separation is, tMs disen-
gaging of consciousness wMch conditions every negation. If
we consider the prior consciousness envisaged as motivation
We see suddenly and evidently that nothing has just slipped
m between that state and the present state. There has been no
break in continuity within the flux of the temporal develop-
naent, for that would force us to return to th'' inadmissible
concept of the infinite divisibility of time and of the temporal
point nr instant as the limit of the division Neither has there
64 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
been an abrupt interpolation of an opaque element to separate
prior from subsequent in the way that a knife blade cuts a
piece of fruit in two. Nor is there a weakening of the motiva-
ting force of the prior consciousnesss; it remains what it is, it
does not lose anything of its urgency. What separates prior
from subsequent is exactly nothing. This nothing is absolutely
impassable, just because it is nothing; for m every obstacle
to be cleared there is something positive which gives itself as
about to be cleared. The prior consciousness is always there
(though with the modification of “pastness”). It constantly
maintains a relation of interpretation with the present con-
sciousness, but on the basis of this existential relation it is
put out of the game, out of the circuit, between parentheses
—exactly as in the eyes of one practicing the phenomenologi-
cal eirox^ 3 the world both is within him and outside of him.
Thus the condition on which human reality can deny all or
part of the world is that human reality carry nothingness
within itself as the nothing vAmAs. separates its present from
all its past. But this is still not aU, for the nothing en-
visaged would not yet have the sense of nothingness; a sus-
pension of being which would remain unnamed, which would
not be consciousness of suspending being would come from
outside consciousness and by reintroducing opacity into the
heart of this absolute lucidity, would have the effect of cutting
it in two.^’^ Furthermore this nothing would by no means be
negative. Nothingness, as we have seen above, is the ground
of the negation because it conceals the negation within itself,'
becaiKe it is the negation as being. It is necessary then that
conscious being constitute itself in relation to its past as sep-
arated from this past by a nothingness. It must necessarily be
conscious of this cleavage in being, but not as a phenomenon
which it experiences, rather as a structure of consciousness
which it is. Freedom is the human being putting his past out
of play by secreting his own nothingness. Let us imderstand
indeed that this original necessity of being its own nothing-
ness does not belong to consciousness intermittently and on
fee occasion of particular negations. This does not happen
just at a particular moment in psychic life when negative or
mterrogative attitudes appear; consciousness continually ex-
penences itself as the mihilation of its past being.
But someone doubtless will believe that he can , use against
us here an objection which we have frequently raised our-
” See Introduction, Section IH.
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
65
selves; if the nihilating consciousness exists only as con-
sciousness of nihilatiqn, we ought to be able to define and
describe a constant mode of consciousness, present qua con-
sciousness, which would be consciousness of nihilation. Does
this consciousness exist? Behold, a new question has been
raised here: if freedom is the being of consciousness, con-
sciousness ought to exist as consciousness of freedom. What
form does this consciousness of freedom assume? In freedom
the human being is his own past (as also his own future) in
the form of nihilation. If our analysis has not led us astray,
there ought to exist for the human being, in so far as he is
conscious of being, a certain mode of standing opposite his
past and his future, as being both this past and this future and
as not being them. We shall be able to furnish an immediate
reply to this question; it is in anguish that man gets the con-
sciousness of his freedom, or if you prefer, anguish is the
mode of being of freedom as consciousness of being; it is in
anguish that freedom is, in its being, in question for itself.
BCierkegaard describing anguish in the face of what one
lacks characterizes it as anguish in the face of freedom. But
Heidegger, whom we know to have been greatly influenced
by Kierkegaard,^® considers anguish instead as the appre-
hension of nothingness. These two descriptions of anguish do
not appear to us contradictory; on the contrary the one
implies the other.
First we must acknowledge that Kierkegaard is right;
anguish is distinguished from fear in that fear is fear of
beings in the world whereas anguish is anguish before myself.
Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling
over the precipice, but of throwing myself over. A situation
provokes fear if there is a possibility of my life being
changed from without; my being provokes anguish to the
extent that I distrust myself and my own reactions in that
situation. The artillery preparation which precedes the attack
can provoke fear in &e soldier who undergoes the bombard-
ment, but anguish is bom in him when he tries to foresee the
conduct with which he will face the bombardment, when
he asks himself if he is going to be able to “hold up.” Sim-
ilarly the recruit who reports for active duty at the beginning
of the war can in some instances be afraid of death, but
more often he is “afraid of being afraid"; that is, he is filled
^Ih anguish before himself. Most of the time dangerous
Wahl: Etudes Kierkegaardiennes, Kierkegaard et Heidegger.
66
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
or threatening situations present themselves in facets; they
will be apprehended through a feeling of fear or of anguish
according to whether we envisage the situation as acting on
the man or the man as acting on the situation. The man who
has just received a hard blow — ^for example, losing a great
part of -his wealth in a crash — can have the fear of threatening
poverty. He will experience anguish a moment later when
nervously wringing his hands (a symbolic reaction to the
action which is imposed but which remains still wholly un-
determined), he exclaims to himself: “What am I going to
do? But what am I going to do?” In this sense fear and an-
guish are exclusive of one another since fear is unreflective
apprehension of the transcendent and anguish is reflective
apprehension of the self; the one is bom in the destruction
of the other. The normal process in the case which I have just
cited is a constant transition from the one to the other. But
there exist also situations where anguish appears pure; that is,
without ever being preceded or followed by fear. If, for ex-
ample, I have been raised to a new dignity and charged with a
delicate and flattering mission, I can feel anguish at the
thought that I will not be capable perhaps of fulfilling it,
and yet I will not have the least fear in the world of the
consequences of my possible failure.
What is the meaning of anguish in the various examples
which I have just given? Let us take up again the ex-
ample of vertigo. Vertigo announces itself through fear;
I am on a narrow path — without a guard rail — which goes
along a precipice. The precipice presents itself to me as to be
avoided; it represents a danger of death. At the same time I
conceive of a certain number of causes, originating in
universal determinism, which can transform that threat of
death into reality; I can slip on a stone and fall into the
abyss; the crumbling earth of the path can give way under my
steps. Through these various anticipations, I am given to my-
self as a thing; I am passive in relation to these possibilities;
they come to me from without; in so far as I am also an object
m the world, subject to gravitation, they are my possibilities.
At ^is moment f ear appears, which in terms of the situation
IS the apprehension of myself as a destructible transcendent
m the midst of transcendents, as an object which does
not contain in itself the origin of its future disappearance.
My reaction will be of the reflective order; I will pay at-
tention to the stones in the road; I will keep myself as far
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
67
as possible from the edge of the path. I realize myself as
pushing away the threatening situation with all my strength,
and I project before myself a certain number of foture con-
ducts destined to keep the threats of the world at a distance
from me. These conducts are my possibilities. I escape fear
by the very fact that I am placing myself on a plane where
my own possibilities are substituted for the transcendent
probabilities where human action had no place.
But these conducts, precisely because they are my possi-
bilities, do not appear to me as determined by foreign causes.
Not only is it not strictly certain that they will be effective; in
particular it is not strictly certain that they will be adopted,
for they do not have existence sufficient in itself. We could
say, varying the expression of Berkeley, that their “being is
a sustained-being” and that their “possibility of being is only
an ought-to-be-sustained. Due to this fact their possibility
has as a necessary condition the possibility of negative conduct
{not to pay attention to the stones in the road, to run, to think
of something else) and the possibility of the opposite conduct
(to throw myself over the precipice) . The possibility which’ I
make my concrete possibility can appear as my possibility only
by raising itself on the basis of the totality of the logical
possibilities which the situation allows. But these rejected
possibilities in turn have no other being than their “sustained-
being”; it is I who sustain them in being, and inversely their
present non-being is an "ought-not-to-be-sustained.” No ex-
ternal cause will remove them. I alone am the permanent
source of their non-being, I engage myself in them; in order
to cause my possibility to appear, I posit the other possibilities
so as to nihilate them. This would not produce anguish if
I could apprehend myself in my relations with these possibles
as a cause producing its effects. In this case the effect defined
as niy possibility would be strictly determined. But then it
would cease to be possible; it would become simply
“about-to-happen.” If &en I wished to avoid anguish and
vertigo, it would be enough if I were to consider the
motives (instinct of self-preservation, prior fear, etc.), which
m^e me reject the situation envisaged, as determining my
pnor activity in the same way that the presence at a deter-
mined point of one given mass determines the courses
followed by other masses; it would be necessary, in other
words, that I apprehend in myself a strict psychological de-
We shall return to possibilities in the second part of this work.
68 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
terminism. But I am in anguish precisely because any conduct
on my part is only possible, and this means that whhe consti-
tuting a totality of motives for pushing away that situation, I
at the same moment apprehend these motives as not suffi-
ciently effective. At the very moment when I apprehend my
being as horror of the precipice, I am conscious of that horror
as not determinant in relation to my possible conduct. In one
sense that horror calls for prudent conduct, and it is in itself
a pre-outline of that conduct; in another sense, it posits the
final developments of that conduct only as possible, precisely
because I do not apprehend it as the cause of these final de-
velopments but as need, appeal, etc.
Now as we have seen, consciousness of being is the being
of consciousness. There is no question here of a contemplation
which I could make after the event, of a horror already
constituted; it is the very being of horror to appear to itself
as “not being the cause” of the conduct it calls for. In short,
to avoid fear, which reveals to me a transcendent future
strictly determined, I take refuge in reflection, but the latter
has only an undetermined future to offer. This means that
in establishing a certain conduct as a possibility and precisely
because it is my possibility, I am aware that nothing can com-
pel me to adopt that conduct. Yet I am indeed already there
in the future; it is for the sake of that being which I will be
there at the turning of the path that I now exert all my
strength, and in this sense there is already a relation between
my future being and my present being. But a nothingness has
slipped into the heart of this relation; I am not the self which
I will be. First I am not that self because time separates me
from it. Secondly, I am not that self because what I am is not
the foundation of what I will be. Finally I am not that self
because no actual existent can determine strictly what I am
going to be. Yet as I am already what I will be (otherwise I
would not be interested in any one being more than another) ,
I am the self which 1 will be, in the mode of not being it.
It is through my horror that I am carried toward the future,
and the horror nihilates itself in that it constitutes the future
as possible, .^guish is precisely my consciousness of being my
own future, in the mode of not-being. To be exact, the nihila-
tion of horror as a motive, which has the effect of reinforcing
horror as a state, has as its positive counterpart the appearance
of other forms of conduct (in particular that which consists
in throwing myself over the precipice) as my possible possi-
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
69
bilities. If nothing compels me to save my life, nothing pre-
vents me from precipitating myself into the abyss. The de-
cisive conduct will emanate from a self which I am not yet
Thus the self which I am depends on the self which I am not
yet to the exact extent that the self which I am not yet
does not depend on the self which I am. Vertigo appears
as the apprehension of this dependence. I approach the prec-
ipice, and my scrutiny is searching for myself in my very
depths. In terms of th^ moment, I play with my possibilities.
My eyes, running over the abyss from top to bottom, imitate
the possible fall and realize it symbolically; at the same time
suicide, from the fact that it becomes a possibility possible
for me, now causes to appear possible motives for adopting it
(suicide would cause anguish to cease) . Fortunately these mo-
tives in their turn, from the sole fact that they are motives of
a possibility, present themselves as ineffective, as non-deter-
minant; they can no more produce the suicide than my horror
of the fall can determine me to avoid it. It is this counter-
anguish which generally puts an end to anguish by trans-
muting it into indecision. Indecision in its turn calls for de-
cision. I abruptly put myself at a distance from the edge of
the precipice and resume my way.
The example which we have just analyzed has shown
us what we could call “anguish in the face of the future.”
There exists another: anguish in the face of the past. It is
that of the gambler who has freely and sincerely decided not
to gamble anymore and who, when he approaches the
gaming table, suddenly sees all his resolutions melt away. This
phenomenon has often been described as if the sight of the
gaming table reawakened in us a tendency which entered into
conflict with our former resolution and ended by drawing us
in spite ~^of this. Aside from the fact that such a description
is done in materialistic terms and peoples the mind with
opposing forces (there is, for example, the moralists’ famous
‘struggle of reason with the passions”), it does not account
for the facts. In reality — ^the letters of Dostoevsky bear wit-
ness to this — ^there is nothing in us which resembles an inner
debate as if we had to weigh motives and incentives before
deciding. The earlier resolution of “not playing anymore”
IS always there, and in the majority of cases the gambler when
ui the presence of the gaming table, turns toward it as if to
V P^^y> or rather having
taken his resolution the day before, he thinks of himself stUl
70 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
as not wishing to play anymore; he believes in the effectiveness
of this resolution. But what he apprehends then in an^sh is
precisely the total inefficacy of the past resolution. It is there
doubtless but fixed, ineffectual, surpassed by the very fact that
I am conscious of it. The resolution is still me to the extent
that I realize constantly my identity with myself across the
temporal fliix, but it is no longer me — due to the fact that it
has become an object for my consciousness. I am not subject
to it, it fails in the mission which I have given it. The resolu-
tion is there still, I am it in the mode of not-being. What the
gambler apprehends at this instant is again the permanent rup-
ture in determinism; it is nothingness which separates him
from himself; I should have liked so much not to gamble
anymore; yesterday I even had a synthetic apprehension of the
situation (threatening ruin, disappointment of my relatives)
as forbidding me to play. It seemed to me that I had estab-
lished a real barrier between gambling and myself, and now
I suddenly perceive that my former understanding of the situ-
ation is no more than a memory of an idea, a memory of a
feeling. In order for it to come to my aid once more, I must
remake it ex nihilo and freely. The not-gambling is only one
of my possibilities, as the fact of gambling is another of them,
neither more nor less. / must rediscover the fear of financial
ruin or of disappointing my family, etc., I must re-create it as
experienced fear. It stands behind me like a boneless phantom.
It depends on me alone to lend it flesh. I am alone and naked
before temptation as I was the day before. After having pa-
tiently built up barriers and walls, after enclosing myself in
the magic circle of a resolution, I perceive with anguish that
nothing prevents me from gambling. The anguish is me since
by the very fact of taking my position in existence as con-
sciousness of being, I make myself not to be the past of good
resolutions which I am.
It would be in vain to object that the sole condition of this
anguish is ignorance of the underlying psychological deter-
minism. According to such a view my anxiety would corrie
frorn lack of knowing the real and effective incentives which
m the darkness of the unconscious determine nty action,
in reply we shall point out first that anguish has not
appeared to us as a proof of human freedom; the latter was
^yen to us as the necessary condition for the question. We
r f- show that there exists a specific consciousness
ee om, and we wished to show that this consciousness is
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
71
anguish. This means that we wished to establish anguish
in its essential structure as consciousness of freedom. Now
from this point of view the. existence of a psychological de-
terminism could not invalidate the results of our description.
Indeed anguish either is actually an unrealized ignorance of
this determinism — and then anguish apprehends itself in
fact as freedom — or else one may claim that anguish is con-
sciousness of being ignorant of the real causes of our acts.
In the latter case anguish would come from that of which we
have a presentiment, a screen deep within ourselves for mon-
strous motives which would suddenly release guilty acts. But
in this case we should suddenly appear to ourselves as things
in the world; we should be to ourselves or own transcendent
situation. Then anguish would disappear to give way to fear,
for fear is a synthetic apprehension of the transcendent as
dreadful.
This freedom which reveals itself to us in anguish can be
characterized by the existence of that nothing which insin-
uates itself between motives and act. It is not because I am
free that my act is not subject to the determination of mo-
tives; on the contrary, the structure of motives as ineffective
is the condition .of my freedom. If someone asks what this
nothing is which provides a foundation for freedom, we shall
reply that we can not describe it since it is not, but we can
at least hint at its meaning by saying that this nothing is
made-to-be by the human being in his relation with himself.
The nothing here corresponds to the necessity for the motive
to appear as motive only as a correlate of a consciousness of
motive. In short, as soon as we abandon the hypothesis of the
contents of consciousness, we must recognize that there is
never a motive in consciousness; motives are only for con-
sciousness. And due to the very fact that the motive can
arise only as appearance, it constitutes itself as ineffective.
Of course it does not have the externality of a temporal-spatial
“ing; it always belongs to subjectivity and it is apprehended
as mine. But it is by nature transcendence in immanence,
and consciousness is not subject to it because of the very
fact that consciousness posits it; for consciousness has now
me task of conferring on the motive its meaning and its im-
portance, Thus the nothing which separates the motive from
consciousness characterizes itself as transcendence in im-
If is by arising as immanence that consciousness
mmlates the nothing which makes consciousness exist for it-
r
72 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
self as transcendence. But we see that the nothingness which
is the condition of all transcendent negation can be elucidated
only in terms of two other original nihilations: (1) Con-
sciousness is not its own motive inasmuch as it is empty of
all content. This refers us to a nihilating structure of the
pre-reflective cogito. (2) Consciousness confronts its past and
its future as facing a self which it is in the mode of not-
being. This refers us to a nihilating structure of temporality.
There can be for us as yet no question of elucidating
these two types of nihilation; we do not at the moment have
the necessary techniques at our disposal. It is sufficient to
observe here that the definitive explanation of negation can
not be given without a description of self-consciousness and
of temporality.
What we should note at present is that freedom, which
manifests itself through anguish, is characterized by a con-
stantly renewed obligation to remake the Self which designates
the free being. As a matter of fact when we showed earlier
that my possibilities were filled with anguish because it
depended on me alone to sustain them in their existence, that
did not mean that they derived from a Me which, ,to itself at
least, would first be given and would then pass in the temporal
flux from one consciousness to another consciousness. The
gambler who must realize anew the synthetic apperception
, of a situation which would forbid him to play, must rediscover
at the same time the self which can appreciate that situation,
which ‘ is in situation.” Tliis self with its a priori and historical
content is the essence of man. Anguish as the manifestation of
freedom in the face of self means that man is always separated
by a nothingness from his essence. We should refer here to
Hegel s statement: *‘Wesen ist was gewesen ist" Essence is
what has been. Essence is everything in the human being
which we can indicate by the words — that is. Due to this
met it is the totality of characteristics which explain the act.
ut the act is always beyond that essence; it is a human act
on y m so far as it surpasses every explanation which we can
give of It, precisely because the very application of the for-
mula that is” to man causes ail that is designated, to have-
an continually carries with him a pre-judicative com-
hjs essence, but due to this very fact he is
rpniit ^ “^thingness. Essence is all that human
^ /lavmg been. It is here that
ppears as an apprehension of self inasmuch as it
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
73
exists in the perpetual mode of detachment from what is;
better yet, in so far as it makes itself exist as such. For we
can never apprehend an Erlebnis as a living consequence of
that nature which is ours. The overflow of our consciousness
progressively constitutes that nature, but it remains always be-
hind us and it dv/ells in us as the permanent object of our
retrospective comprehension. It is in so far as this nature is
a demand without being a recourse that it is apprehended
in anguish.
In anguish freedom is anguished before itself inasmuch as
it is instigated and bound by nothing. Someone will say,
freedom has just been defined as a permanent structure of the
human being: if anguish manifests it, then anguish ought to
be a permanent state of my affectivity. But, on the contrary,
it is completely exceptional. How can we explain the rarity
of the phenomenon of anguish?
We must note first of aU that the most common situations
of our life, those in which we apprehend our possibilities as
such by means of actively realizing them, do not manifest
themselves to us through anguish because their very structure
excludes anguished apprehension. Anguish in fact is the rec-
ognition of a possibility as my possibility; that is, it is con-
stituted when consciousness sees itself cut from its essence by
nothingness or separated from the futme by its very freedom.
This means that a nihilating nothing removes from me all
excuse and that at the same time what I project as my future
being is always nihilated and reduced to the rank of simple
possibility because the future which I am remains out of my
reach. But we ought to remark that in these various
instances we have to do with a temporal form where I await
myself in the future, where I “make an appointment with
myself on the other side of that hour, of that day, or of that
month.” Anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that ap-
pointment, of no longer even wishing to bring myself there.
But I can also find myself engaged in acts which reveal my
possibilities to me at the very instant when they are realized,
in lighting this cigarette I learn my concrete possibility, or if
you prefer, my desire of smoking. It is by the very act of
drawing’ toward me this paper and this pen that I give to my-
self as my most immediate possibility the act of working at
this book; there I am engaged, and I discover it at the very
moment v/hen I am already throwing myself into it. At that in-
stant, to be sure, it remains my possibility, since I can at each
74 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
instant turn myself away from my work, push away the note-
book, put the cap on my fountain pen. But this possibility of
interrupting the action is rejected on a second level by the
fact that the action which discovers itself to me through my
act tends to crystallize as a transcendent, relatively independent
form. The consciousness of man in action is non-reflective
consciousness. It is consciousness of something, and the tran-
scendent which discloses itself to this consciousness is of a
particular nature; it is a structure of exigency in the world,
and the world correlatively discloses in it complex relations of
instrumentality. In the act of tracing the letters which I aui
writing, the whole sentence, still unachieved, is revealed as a
passive exigency to be written. It is the very meaning of the
letters which I form, and its appeal is not put into question,
precisely because I can not write the words without transcend-
ing them toward the sentence and because I discover it as the
necessary condition for the meaning of the words which I am
writing. At the same time in the very framework of the act an
indicative complex of instruments reveals itself and organizes
itself (pen-ink-paper-lines-raargin, etc.), a complex which can
not be apprehended for itself but which rises in the heart of
the transcendence which discloses to me as a passive exigency
the sentence to be written. Thus in the quasi-generality of
everyday acts, I am engaged, I have ventured, and I discover
my possibilities by realizing them and in the very act of realiz-
ing them as exigencies, urgencies, instrumentalities.
^ Of course m eve^ act of this kind, there remains the possi-
bility of putting this act into question — in so far as it refers
to more distant, more essential ends — as to its ultimate
meanings and my essential possibilities. For example, the
sentence which I write is the meaning of the letters which
I trace, but the whole work which I wish to produce is the
meaning of the sentence. And this work is a possibility in
connection with which I can feel anguish; it is truly my possi-
bility, and I do not know whether I will continue it tomor-
row;^ torriorrow in relation to it my freedom can exercise
its nihilating power. But that anguish implies the apprehension
of the work as such as my possibility. I must place myself
directly opposite it and realize my relation to it. This means
at I ought not only to raise with reference to it objective
^estions such as, “Is it necessary to write this work?” for
these quejions refer me simply to wider objective significa-
tions, such as, “Is it opportune to write it at this moment?
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
75
Isn’t this just a repetition of another such book? Is its material
of sufficient interest? Has it been sufficiently thought through?”
etc. — all significations which remain transcendent and give
themselves as a multitude of exigencies in the world.
In order for my freedom to be anguished in connection
with the book which I am writing, this book must appear in
its relation with me. On the one hand, I must discover my
essence as what I have been — have been “wanting to write
this book,” I have conceived it, I have believed that it would
be interesting to write it, and I have constituted myself in
such a way that it is not possible to understand me without
taking into account the fact that this book has been my essen-
tial possibility. On the other hand, I must discover the
nothhigness which separates my freedom from this essence:
/ have been “wanting to write,” but nothing, not even what
I have been, can compel me to write it. Finally, I must dis-
cover the nothingness which separates me from what I shall
be: I discover that the permanent possibility of abandoning
the book is the very condition of the possibility of writing it
and the very meaning of my freedom. It is necessary that in
the very constitution of the book as my possibility, I appre-
hend my freedom as being the possible destroyer in the pres-
ent and in the future of what I am. That is, I must place
myself on the plane of reflection. So long as I remain on the
plane of action, the book to be written is only the distant and
presupposed meaning of the act which reveals my possibilities
to me. The book is only the implication of the action; it is
not made an object and posited for itself; it does not “raise
the question”; it is conceived neither as necessary nor contin-
gent. It is onl}^ the permanent, remote meaning in terms of
which I can understand what I am writing in the present,
and hence, it is conceived as being; that is, only by positing
the book as the existing basis on which my present, existing
sentence emerges, can I confer a determined meaning upon
my sentence.
Now at each instant we are thrust into the world and en-
gaged there. This means that we act before positing our possi-
bilities and that these possibilities which are disclosed as
realized or in process of being realized refer to meanings
^ich necessitate special acts in order to be put into question.
Ine alann which rings in the morning refers to the possibility
of my going to work, which is my possibility. But to appre-
end the summons of the alarm as a summons is to get up.
76 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Therefore the very act of getting up is reassuring, for it eludes
the question, “Is work my possibility?” Consequently it does
not put me in a position to apprehend the possibility of
quietism, of refusing to work, and finally the possibility of
refusing the world and the possibility of death. In short, to
the extent that I apprehend the meaning of the ringing, I am
already up at its summons; this apprehension guarantees me
against the anguished intuition that it is I who confer on the
alarm clock its exigency — 1 and I alone.
In the same way, what we might call everyday morality is
exclusive of ethical anguish. There is ethical anguish when I
consider myself in my original relation to values. Values in
actuality are demands which lay claim to a foundation. But
this foundation can in no way be being, for every value which
would base its ideal nature on its being would thereby cease
even to be a value and would realize the heteronomy of my
will. Value derives its being from its exigency and not its
exigency from its being. It does not deliver itself to a contem-
plative intuition which would apprehend it as being value
and thereby would remove from it its right over my freedom.
On the contrary, it can be revealed only to an active freedom
which makes it exist as value by the sole fact of recognizing it
as such. It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation
of values and that nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in
adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular
scale of values. As a being by whom values exist, I am un-
justifiable. My freedom is anguished at being the founda-
tion of values while itself without foundation. It is anguished
in addition because values, due to the fact that they are essen-
tially revealed to a freedom, can not disclose themselves
without being at the same time “put into question,” for the
posssibility of overturning the scale of values appears com-
plementarily as my possibility. It is anguish before values
which is the recognition of the ideality of values.
Ordinarily, however, my attitude with respect to values is .
eminently reassuring. In fact I am engaged- in a world of
values. The anguished apperception of values as sustained in
being my freedom is a secondary and mediated phenome-
non. The immediate is the world with its urgency; and in this
world where I engage myself, my acts cause values to spring
up like partridges. My indignation has given to me the nega-
ive value baseness,’ my admiration has given the positive
va ue grandeur. Above all my obedience to a multitude of
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
77
tabus, which is real, reveals these tabus to me as existing in
fact. The bourgeois who call themselves “respectable citizens”
do not become respectable as the result of contemplating
moral values. Rather from the moment of their arising in the
world they are thrown into a pattern of behavior the meaning
of which is respectability. Thus respectability acquires a being;
it is not put into question. Values are sown on my path
as thousands of little real demands, like the signs which order
us to keep off the grass.
Thus in what we shall call the world of the immediate,
which delivers itself to our unreflective consciousness, we do
not first appear to ourselves, to be thrown subsequently into
enterprises. Our being is immediately “in situation”; that is,
it arises in enterprises and knows itself first in so far as it is
reflected in those enterprises. We discover ourselves then in a
world peopled with demands, in the heart of projects “in the
course of realization.” I write. I am going to smoke. I have
an appointment this evening with Pierre. I must not forget
to reply to Simon. I do not have the right to conceal the truth
any longer from Claude. All these trivial passive expectations
of the real, all these commonplace, everyday values, derive
their meaning from an original projection of myself which
stands as my choice of myself in the world. But to be exact,
this projection of myself toward an original possibility, which
causes the existence of values, appeals, expectations, and in
general a world, appears to me only beyond the world as the
meaning and the abstract, logical signification of my enter-
prises. For the rest, there exist concretely alarm clocks, sign-
boards, tax forms, policemen, so many guard rails against
anguish. But as soon as the enterprise is held at a distance
from me, as soon as I am referred to myself because I must
await myself in the future, then I discover myself suddenly
as the one who gives its meaning to the alarm clock, the one
who by a signboard forbids himself to walk on a flower bed
or on the lawn, the one from whom the boss’s order borrows
its urgency, the one who decides the interest of the book
wluch he is writing, the one finally who makes the values
exist in order to determine his action by their demands. I
emerge alone and in anguish confronting the unique and
original project which constitutes my being; all the barriers,
all the guard rails collapse, nihilated by the consciousness of
Diy freedom. I do not have nor can I have recourse to any
value against the fact that it is I who sustain values in being.
78
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Nothing can ensure me against myself, cut off from the world
and from my essence by this nothingness which I am. 1 have
to realize the meaning of the world and of my essence; I
make my decision concerning them — ^without justification
and without excuse.
Anguish then is the reflective apprehension of freedom by
itself. In this sense it is mediation, for although it is immedi-
ate consciousness of itself, it arises from the negation of the
appeals of the world. It appears at the moment that I disen-
gage myself from the world where I had been engaged — in
order to apprehend myself as a consciousness which possesses
a pre-ontological comprehension of its essence and a pre-
judicative sense of its possibilities. Anguish is opposed to the
mind of the serious man who apprehends values in terms of
the world and who resides in the reassuring, materialistic
substantiation of values. In the serious mood I define myself
in terms of the object by pushing aside a priori as impossible
all enterprises in which I am not engaged at the moment;
the meaning which my freedom has given to the world, I ap-
prehend as coming from the world and constituting my ob-
ligations. In anguish I apprehend myself at once as totally free
and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world ex-
cept as coming from myself.
We should not however conclude that being brought on
to the reflective plane and envisaging one’s distant or imme-
diate possibilities suffice to apprehend oneself in pure an-
guish. In each instance of reflection anguish is bom as a
structure of the reflective consciousness in so far as the latter
considers consciousness as an object of reflection; but it still
remains possible for me to maintain various types of conduct
with respect to my own anguish — ^in particular, patterns of
flight. Everything takes place, in fact, as if our essential and
immediate behavior with respect to anguish is flight. Psycho-
logical determinism, before being a theoretical conception, is
first an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the basis of all
attitudes of excuse. It is reflective conduct with respect to
anguish; it asserts that there are within us antagonistic forces
whose type of existence is comparable to that of things. It
attempts to fill the void which encircles us, to re-establish the
links between past and present, between present and future.
It provides us with a nature productive of our acts, and these
very acts it makes transcendent; it assigns to them a founda-
tion m something other than themselves by endowing them
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
79
with an inertia and externality eminently reassuring because
they constitute a permanent game of excuses. Psychological
determinism denies that transcendence of human reality
which makes it emerge in anguish beyond its own essence. At
the same time by reducing us to never being anything but
what we are, it reintroduces in us the absolute positivity of
being-in-itself and thereby reinstates us at the heart of
being.
But this determinism, a reflective defense against anguish,
is not given as a reflective intuition. It avails nothing against
the evidence of freedom; hence it is given as a faith to take
refuge in, as the ideal end toward which we can flee to escape
anguish. That is made evident on the philosophical plane by
the fact that deterministic psychologists do not claim to
found their thesis on the pure givens of introspection. They
present it as a satisfying hypothesis, the value of which comes
from the fact that it accounts for the facts — or as a necessary
postulate for establishing all psychology. They admit the ex-
istence of an immediate consciousness of freedom, which their
opponents hold up against them under the name of “proof
by intuition of the inner sense.” They merely focus the debate
on the value of this inner revelation. Thus the intuition
which causes us to apprehend ourselves as the original cause
of our states and our acts has been discussed by nobody. It is
within the reach of each of us to try to mediate an-
guish by rising above it and by judging it as an fllusion due
to the mistaken belief that we are the real causes of our acts.
The problem which presents itself then is that of the degree
of faith in this mediation. Is an anguish placed under judg-
ment a disarmed anguish? Evidently not. However here a new
phenomenon is bom, a process of “distraction” in relation to
anguish which, once again, supposes within it a nihilating
power.
By itself determinism would not sufiice to establish dis-
traction since determinism is only a postulate or an hypothesis.
This process of detachment is a more complete activity of
flight which operates on the very level of reflection. It is first
an attempt at distraction in relation to the possibles opposed
to my possible. When I constitute myself as the compre-
hension of a possible as my possible, I must recognize its ex-
istence at the end of my project and apprehend it as myself,
awaiting me down there in the future and separated from me
by a nothingness. In this sense I apprehend myself as the
80 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
original source of my possibility, and it is this which ordinar-
ily we call the consciousness of freedom. It is this structure
of consciousness and this alone that the proponents of free
will have in mind when they speak of the intuition of the
inner sense. But it happens that I force myself at the same
time to be distracted from the constitution of other possibili-
ties which contradict my possibility. In truth I can not avoid
positing their existence by the same movement which gener-
ates the chosen possibility as mine. I can not help constituting
them as living possibilities; that is, as having the possibility
of becoming my possibilities. But I force myself to see them
as endowed with a transcendent, purely logical being, in
short, as things. If on the reflective plane I envisage the
possibility of writing this book as my possibility, then be-
tween this possibility and my consciousness I cause a nothing-
ness of being to arise which constitutes the writing of the book
as a possibility and which I apprehend precisely in the per-
manent possibility that the possibility of not writing the book
is my possibility. But I attempt to place myself on the other
side of the possibility of not writing it as I might do with
respect to an observable object, and I let myself be pene-
trated with what I wish to see there; I try to apprehend the
possibility of not writing as needing to be mentioned merely
as a reminder, as not concerning me. It must be an external
possibility in relation to me, like movement in relation to the
motionless billiard ball. If I could succeed in this, the possi-
bilities hostile to my possibility would be constituted as logical
entities and would lose their effectiveness. They would no
longer be threatening since they would be “outsiders,”
since they would surround my possible as purely conceivable
eventualities; that is, fundamentally, conceivable by another
or as possibles of another who might find himself in the same
situation. They would belong to the objective situation as a
transcendent structure, or if you prefer (to utilize Heidegger’s
terminology) — I shall write this book but anybody could
also not write it. Thus I should hide from myself the fact that
the possibles are myself and that they are immanent conditions
of the possibility of my possible. They would presers'e just
enough being to preserve for my possible its character as
gratuitous, as a free possibility for a free being, but they would
be disarmed of their threatening character. They would not
interest me; the chosen possible would appear — due to its
selection— as my only concrete possible, and consequently
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION 81
tlic nothingness which separates me from it and which actually
confers on it its possibility would collapse.
But Bight before anguish is not only an clTort at distraction
before the future; it attempts also to disarm the past of its
llireat What I attempt to flee here is my very transcendence
in so far as it sustains and surpasses my essence. I assert that
I am my essence in the mode of being of the in-itself. At
tlie same time I always refuse to consider that essence as
being historically constituted and as implying my action as a
circle implies its properties. I apprehend it, or at least I try to
apprehend it as the original beginning of my possible, and I
do not admit at all that it has in itself a beginning. I assert
then that an act is free when it exactly reflects my essence.
However, this freedom which would disturb me if it were
freedom before myself, I attempt to bring back to the heart
of my essence— /.e., of my self. It is a matter of envisaging
the self as a little God which inhabits me and which possesses
my freedom aS a metaphysical virtue. It would be no longer
my being which would be free qua being but my Self which
would be free in the heart of my consciousness. It is a fiction
eminently reassuring since freedom has been driven down into
the heart of an opaque being; to the extent that my essence
is not translucency, that it is transcendent in immanence,
freedom would become one of its properties. In short, it is a
matter of apprehending my freedom in my self as the free-
dom of another.20 We see the principal themes of this fiction:
My self becomes the origin of its acts as the other of his,
by virtue of a personality already constituted. To be sure,
he (the self) lives and transforms himself; we will admit
even that each of his acts can contribute to transforming
him. But these harmonious, continued transformations arc
conceived on a biological order. They resemble those which
I can establish in my friend Pierre when I see him after a
separation. Bergson expressly satisfied these demands for re-
assurance when he conceived his theory of the profound self
which endures and organizes itself, which is constantly con-
temporary with the consciousness which I have of it and which
can not be surpassed by consciousness, which is found at
of my acts not as a cataclysmic pow’er but as a
father begets his children, in such away that the act without
follow'ing from the essence as a strict consequence, without
c\cn being foreseeable, enters into a reassuring relation with
** Cf. Pnrt Tlirce, Chapter One,
82
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
it, a family resemblance. The act goes farther than the self but
along the same road; it preserves, to be sure, a certain ir-
reducibility, but we recognize ourselves in it, and we find
ourselves in it as a father can recognize himself and find
himself in the son who continues his work. Thus by a
projection of freedom — ^which we apprehend in ourselves —
into a psychic object which is the self, Bergson has contribut-
ed to disguise our anguish, but it is at the expense of con-
sciousness itself. What he has established and described in
this manner is not our freedom as it appears to itself; it is
the freedom of the Other.
Such then is the totality of processes by which we try to
hide anguish from ourselves; we apprehend our particular
possible by avoiding considering all other possibles, which we
make the possibles of an undifferentiated Other. The chosen
possible we do not wish to see as sustained in being by a pure
nihilating freedom, and so we attempt to apprehend it as
engendered by an object already constituted, which is no
other than our self, envisaged and described as if it were
another person. We should like to preserve from the original
intuition what it reveals to us as our independence and our
responsibility but we tone down all the original nihilation in
it; moreover we are always ready to take refuge in a belief
in determinism if this freedom weighs upon us or if we need
an excuse. Thus we flee from anguish by attempting to ap-
prehend ourselves from without as an Other or as a thing.
What we are accustomed to call a revelation of the inner sense
or^ an original intuition of our freedom contains nothing
original; it is an already constructed process, expressly de-
signed to hide from ourselves anguish, the veritable “imme-
diate given” of our freedom.
Do these various constructions succeed in stifling or hid-
ing our anguish? It is certain that we can not overcome an-
guish, for we are anguish. As for veiling it, aside from the
fact that the very nature of consciousness and its translucency
forbid us to take the expression literally, we must note the
particular type of behavior which it indicates. We can hide an
external object because it exists independently of us. For
the same reason we can turn our look or our attention away
very simply, fix our eyes on some other
object; henceforth each reality — mine and that of the object —
resumes its own life, and the accidental relation which united
consciousness to the thing disappears without thereby altering
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
83
either existence. But I am what I wish to veil, the question
takes on quite another aspect I can in fact wish “not to see”
a certain aspect of my being only if I am acquainted with the
aspect which I do not wish to see. This means that in my
being I must indicate this aspect in order to be able to turn
myself away from it; better yet, I must think of it constantly
in order to take care not to think of it In this connection it
must be understood not only that I must of necessity perpetu-
ally carry within me what I wish to flee but also that I must
aim at the object of my flight in order to flee it. This means
that anguish, the intentional aim of anguish, and a flight
from anguish toward reassuring myths must all be given in
the unity of the same consciousness. In a word, I flee in order
not to Imow, but I can not avoid knowing that I am fleeing;
and the flight from anguish is only a mode of becoming
conscious of anguish. Thus anguish, properly speaking, can be
neither hidden nor avoided.
Yet to flee anguish and to be anguish can not be exactly
the same thing. If- 1 am my anguish in order to flee it, that
presupposes that I can decenter myself in relation to what I
am, feat I can be anguish in the form of “not-being it,”
feat I can dispose of a nihilating power at the heart of an-
guish itself. This nihilating power nihilates anguish in so far
as I flee it and nihilates itself m so far as I am anguish in
order to flee it. This attitude is what we call bad faith. There
is then no question of expelling anguish from consciousness
nor of constituting it in an unconscious psychic phenomenon;
very simply I can make myself guilty of bad faith while ap-
prehendmg fee anguish which I am, and this bad faith, in-
tended to fill up the nothingness which I am in my relation to
myself, precisely implies the nothingness which it suppresses.
We are now at the end of our first description. The exam-
ination of the negation can not lead us farther. It has re-
vealed to us the existence of a particular type of conduct:
conduct in the face of non-being, which supposes a special
hanscendence needing separate study. We find ourselves then
in fee presence of two human ekstases: the ekstasis which
throws us into being-in-itself and the ekstasis which engages
ns in non-being. It seems that our original problem, which con-
cerned only the relations of man to being, is now consider-
ably complicated. But in pushing our aniysis of transcen-
dence toward non-being to its conclusion, it is possible for us
to get valuable information for the understanding of all tran-
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
scendence. Furthermore tire problem of nothingness can not
be excluded from our inquiry. If man adopts any particular
behavior in the face of being-in-itself— and our philosophical
question is a type of such behavior — it is because he is
not this being. We rediscover non-being as a condition of
the transcendence toward being. We must then catch hold
of the problem of nothingness and not let it go before its
Complete elucidation.
However the examination of the question and of the nega-
tion has given us all that it can. We have been referred by it
to empirical freedom as the nihilation of man in the heart
of temporality and as the necessary condition for the tran-
scending apprehension of ndgatitds. It remains to found this
empirical freedom. It can not be both the original nihilation
and the ground of all nihilation. Actually it contributes to
constituting transcendences in immanence which condition all
negative transcendences. But the very fact that the tran-
scendences of empirical freedom arc constituted in immanence
as transcendences shows us that we arc dealing with secondary
nihUations which suppose the existence of an original nothing-
ness. They are only a stage in the analytical regression which
leads us from the examples of transcendence called "‘negatites”
to the being which is its own nothingness. Evidently it is
necessary to find the foundation of all negation in a nihilation
which is exercised in the very heart of immanence; in absolute
immanence, in the pure subjectivity of the instantaneous cogito
we must discover the original act by which man is to himself
his own nothingness. What must be the nature of conscious-
ness in order that man in consciousness and in terms of con-
sciousness should arise in the world as the being who is his
own nothingness and by whom nothingness comes into the
world?
We seem to lack, here the instrument to permit us to re-
solve this new problem; negation directly engages only free-
dom. We must find in freedom itself the conduct which will
pernut us to push further. Now this conduct, which will lead
threshold of immanence and which remains still
sufficiently objective so that we can objectively disengage its
wn itions of possibility — -this we have already encountered.
ave we not remarked earlier that in bad faith, we are an-
pish-in-order-to-flee-anguish within the unity of a single con-
ciousness? If bad faith is to be possible, we should be able
withm the same consciousness to meet with the unity of being
THE ORIGIN OF NEGATION
85
and non-being — ^the' being-in-order-not-to-be. Bad faith is
going to be the next object of our investigation. For man to
be able to question, he must be capable of being his own
nothingness; that is, he can be at the origin of non-being in
being only if his being — ^in himself and by himself — ^is para-
lyzed with nothingness. Thus the transcendences of past and
future appear in the temporal being of human reality. But bad
faith is instantaneous. What then are we to say that conscious-
ness must be in the instantaneity of the pre-reflective
cogito — if the human being is to be capable of bad faith?
CHAPTER TWO
Bad Faith
I. BAD FAITH AND FALSEHOOD
The human being is not only the being by whom negatites
are disclosed in the world; he is also the one who can take
negative attitudes with respect to himself. In our Introduc-
tion we defined consciousness as “a being such that in its
being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies
a being other than itself.” But now that we have examined
the meaning of “the question,” we can at present also write
the formula thus: “Consciousness is a being, the nature of
which is to ^ be conscious of the nothingness of its being.”
to a prohibition or a veto, for example, the human being
ernes a future transcendence. But this negation is not ex-
p icative. My consciousness is not restricted to envisioning
a negatite. It constitutes itself in its own flesh as the nihfla-
on o a ^ssibility which another human reality projects as
Its possibihty. For that reason it must arise in the world as a
86
BAD FAITH
87
Wo; it is as a No that the slave first apprehends the mas-
ter, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the
guard who is watching him. There are even men (e.g., care-
takers, overseers, gaolers), whose social reality is uniquely
that of' the No, who will live and die, having forever been
only a No upon the earth. Others, so as to make the No a ,
part of their very subjectivity, establish their human per-
sonality as a perpetual negation. This is the meaning and
function of what Scheler calls “the man of resentment” —
in reality, the No. But there exist more subtle behaviors,
the description of which will lead us further into the in-
wardness of consciousness. Irony is one of these. In irony a
man annihilates what he posits within one and the same
act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he
aflSrms to deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive ob-
ject but it has no being other than its nothingness. Thus
attitudes of negation toward the self permit us to raise a
new question: What are we to say is the being of man who
has the possibility of denying himself? But it is out of the
question to discuss the attitude of “self-negation” in its uni-
versality. The kinds of behavior which can be ranked under
this heading are too diverse; we risk retaining only the ab-
stract form of them. It is best to choose and to examine one
determined attitude which is essential to human reality and
which is such that consciousness instead of directing its ne-
gation outward turns it toward itself. This attitude, it seems
to me, is bad faith {mauvaise foi).
Frequently this is identified with falsehood. We say in-
differently of a person that he shows signs of bad faith or
that he lies to himself. We shall willingly grant that bad
faith is a lie to oneself, on condition that we distinguish
the lie to oneself from lying in general. Lying is a negative
attitude, we will agree to that. But this negation does not
l>ear on consciousness itself; it aims only at the transcendent.
The essence of the lie implies in fact that the liar actually
is in complete possession of the truth which he is hiding.
A man does not lie about what he is ignorant of; he does
not lie when he spreads an error of which he himself is the
dupe; he does not lie when he is mistaken. The ideal descrip-
tion of the liar would be a, cynical consciousness, affirming
t^th within himself, denying it in his words, and denying
that negation as such. Now this doubly negative attitude
rests on the transcendent; the fact expressed is transcendent
88 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
since it does not exist, and the original negation rests on a
truth; that is, on a particular type of transcendence. As for
the inner negation which I effect correlatively with the afiBr-
mation for myself of the truth, this rests on words; that is, on
an event in the world. Furthermore the inner disposition of
the liar is positive;* it could be the object of an affirmative
judgment. The liar intends to deceive and he does not seek
to hide this intention from himself nor to disguise the trans-
lucency of consciousness; on the contrary, he has recourse to
it when there is a question of deciding secondary behavior.
It explicitly exercises a regulatory control over all attitudes.
As for his flaunted intention of telling the truth (“Fd never
want to deceive youl This is true! I swear itl”) — ^all this,
of course, is the object of an inner negation, but also it
is not recognized by the liar as his intention. It is played,
imitated, it is the intention of the character which he plays
in the eyes of his questioner, but this character, precisely
because he does not exist, is a transcendent. Thus the lie
does not put into the play the inner structure of present
consciousness; all the negations which constitute it bear
on objects which by this fact are removed from conscious-
ness. The lie then does not require special ontological founda-
tion, and the explanations which the existence of negation
in general requires are valid without change in the case of
deceit. Of course we have described the ideal lie; doubtless
it happens often enough that the liar is more or less the
victim of his lie, that he half persuades himself of it. But
these common, popular forms of the lie are also degenerate
aspects of it; they represent intermediaries between false-
hood and bad faith. The lie is a behavior of transcendence.
The lie is also a normal phenomenon of what Heidegger
calls the "/nit-sein."^ It presupposes my existence, the ex-
istence of the Other, my existence for the Other, and the
existence of the Other for me. Thus there is no difSculty
in holding that the liar must make the project of the lie in
entire clarity and that he must possess a complete compre-
hension^ of the lie and of the truth which he is altering. It
IS sufficient that an over-all opacity hide his intentions from
the Other; it is sufficient that the Other can take the lie
or truth. By the lie consciousness affirms that it exists by
nature as hidden from^ the Other; it utilizes for its own
’•Tr. A “being-with” others in the world.
BAD FAITH
profit the ontological duality of myself and myself in the
eyes of the Other.
The situation can not be the same for bad faith if this, as
we have said, is indeed a lie to oneself. To be sure, the one
who practices bad faith is hiding a displeasing truth or pre-
senting as truth a pleasing untruth. Bad faith then has in
appearance the structure of falsehood. Only what changes
everything is the fact that in bad faith it is from myself
tliat I am hiding the truth. Thus the duality of the deceiver
and the deceived does not exist here. Bad faith on the con-
trary implies in essence the unity of a single consciousness.
This does not mean that it can not be conditioned by tlic
mit-sein like all other phenomena of human reality, but the
mit-sdn can call forth bad faith only by presenting itself
as a situation which bad faith permits surpassing; bad faith
docs not come from outside to human reality. One does not
undergo his bad faith; one is not infected with it; it is not
a state. But consciousness affects itself with bad faith.
There must be an original intention and a project of bad
faith; this project implies a comprehension of bad faith as
such and a pre-reflective apprehension (of) consciousness as
affecting itself with bad faith. It follows first that the one to
whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and tlie
same person, which means that I must know in my capacity
as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capaci-
ty as the one deceived. Better yet I must know the truth
very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully — and this
not at two different moments, which at a pinch would al-
low us to re-establish a semblance of duality — but in the
unitary structure of a single project. How then can the lie
subsist if the duality which conditions it is suppressed?
To this difficulty is added another which is derived from
the total translucency of consciousness. That which affects
itolf witli bad faith must be conscious (of) its bad faith
since the being of consciousness is consciousness of being,
h appears then that I must be in good faith, at least to the
that I am conscious of my bad faith. But then this
^nole psychic system is annihilated. We must agree in fact
that if I deliberately and cynically attempt to lie to myself,
fail completely in this undertaking; the lie falls back and
CO lapses beneath my look: it is ruined /rom behind by the
^cry consciousness of lying to myself which pitilessly con-
- Uuics itself well within my project as its very' condition.
90 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
We have here an evanescent phenomenon which exists only
in and through its own differentiation. To be .sure, these
phenomena are frequent and we shall see that there is in
fact an “evanescence” of bad faith, which, it^ is evident,
vacillates continually between good faith and cynicism; Even
though the existence of bad faith is very precarious, and
though it belongs to the kind of psychic structures which
we might call metastable, ^ it presents nonetheless an au-
tonomous and durable form. It can even be the normal
aspect of life for a very great number of people. A person
can live in bad faith, which does not mean that he does not
have abrupt awakenings to cynicism or to good faith, but
which implies a constant and particular style of life. Our
embarrassment then appears extreme since we can neither
reject nor comprehend bad faith.
To escape from these difficulties people gladly have re-
course to the unconscious. In the psychoanalytical interpre-
tation, for example, they use the hypothesis of a censor,
conceived as a line of demarcation with customs, passport
division, currency control, etc., to re-establish the duality of
the deceiver and the deceived. Here instinct or, if you pre-
fer, original drives and complexes of drives constituted by
our individual history, make up reality. It is neither true
nor false since it does not exist for itself. It simply is, ex-
actly like this table, which is neither true nor false in itself
but simply real. As for the conscious symbols of the in-
stinct, this interpretation takes them not for appearances but
for real psychic facts. Fear, forgetting, dreams exist really
in the capacity of concrete facts of consciousness in the same
way as the words and the attitudes of the liar are concrete,
really existing patterns of behavior. The subject has the
same relation to these phenomena as the deceived to the
behavior of the deceiver. He establishes them in their re-
^ity and must interpret them. There is a truth in the ac-
tivities of the deceiver; if the deceived could reattach them
to the situation where the deceiver establishes himself and
to his project of the lie, they would become integral parts
of truth, by virtue of being lying conduct. Similarly there is
a truth in the symbolic acts; it is what the psychoanalyst
iscovers when he reattaches them to the historical situation
o t e patient, to the unconscious complexes which they
Sartre s own word, meaning subject to sudden changes or transitions.
BAD FAITH
91
express,, to the blocking of the censor. Thus the subject de-
ceives himself about the meaning of his conduct, he appre-
hends it in its concrete existence but not in its truth, sim-
ply because he cannot derive it from an original situation
and from a psychic constitution which remain alien to him.
By the distinction between the “id” and the “ego,” Freud
has cut the psychic whole into two. I am the ego but I am
not the id. I hold no privileged position in relation to
my unconscious psyche. I am my own psychic phenomena
in so far as I establish them in their conscious reality. For
example I am the impulse to steal this or that book from
this bookstall. I am an integral part of the impulse; I bring
it to light and I determine myself hand-in-hand with it to
commit the theft. But I am not those psychic facts, in so
far as I receive them passively and am obliged to resort to
hypotheses about their origin and their true meaning, just
as the scholar makes conjectures about the nature and es-
sence of an external phenomenon. This theft, for example,
which I interpret as an immediate impulse determined by
the rarity, the interest, or the price of the volume which I
am going to steal-r-it is in truth a process derived from self-
punishment, which is attached more or less directly to an
Oedipus complex. The impulse toward the theft contains a
truth which can be reached only by more or less probable
hypotheses. The criterion of this truth will be the number
of conscious psychic facts which it explains; from a more
pragmatic point of view it will be also the success of the
psychiatric cure which it allows. Finally the discovery of
this truth will necessitate the cooperation of the psycho-
analyst, who appears as the mediator between my uncon-
scious drives and my conscious life. The Other appears as
being able to effect the" synthesis between the unconscious
thesis and the conscious antithesis. I can know myself only
through the mediation of the other, which means that I
stand in relation to my “id,” in the position of the Other.
If I have a little knowledge of psychoanalysis, I can, under
circumstances particularly favorable, try to psychoanalyze my-
self. But this attempt can succeed^ only if I distrust every
of intuition, only if I apply to my case from the out-
side, abstract schemes and rules already learned. As for the
results, whether they are obtained by my efforts alone or
^ith the cooperation of a technician, they will never have
6 certainty which intuition confers; they will possess sim-
92 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ply the always increasing probability of scientific hypotheses.
The hypothesis of the Oedipus complex, like the atomic
theory, is nothing but an “experimental idea”; as Pierce
said, it is not to be distinguished from the totality of ex-
periences which it allows to be realized and the results which
it enables us to foresee. Thus psychoanalysis substitutes for
the notion of bad faith, the idea of a lie without a liar; it
allows me to understand how it is possible for me to be lied
to without lying to myself since it places me in the same re-
lation to myself that the Other is in respect to me; it replaces
the duality of the deceiver and the deceived, the essential
condition of the lie, by that of the “id” and the “ego.” It
introduces into my subjectivity the deepest intersubjective
structure of the mitsein. Can this explanation satisfy us?
Considered more closely the psychoanalytic theory is not
as simple as it first appears. It is not accurate to hold that
the “id” is presented as a thing in relation to the hypothesis
of the psychoanalyst, for a thing is indifferent to the con-
jectures which we make concerning it, while the “id” on the
contrary is sensitive to them when we approach the truth.
Freud in fact reports resistance when at the end of the first
period the doctor is approaching the truth. This resistance
is objective behavior apprehended from without: the patient
shows defiance, refuses to speak, gives fantastic accounts of
his dreams, sometimes even removes himself completely from
the psychoanalytic treatment. It is a fair question to ask what
part of himself can thus resist. It can not be the “Ego,” en-
visaged as a psychic totality of the facts of consciousness;
this could not suspect that the psychiatrist is approaching
the end since the ego’s relation to the meaning of its own
reactions is exactly like that of the psychiatrist himself. At
the very most it is possible for the ego to appreciate objec-
tively the degree of probability in the hypotheses set forth,
as a witness of the psychoanalysis might be able to do, ac-
cording to the number of subjective facts which they ex-
plain. Furthermore, this probability would appear to the ego
to border on certainty, which he could not take offense at
since most of the tune it is he who by a conscious decision
is in pursuit of the psychoanalytic therapy. Are we to say
that the patient is disturbed by the daily revelations which
Ae psychoanalyst makes to him and that he seeks to remove
hi^eu, at the same time pretending in his own eyes to
wish to continue the treatment? In this case it is no longer
BAD FAITH
93
possible to resort to the unconscious to explain bad faith;
it is there in full consciousness, with all its contradictions.
But this is not the way that the psychoanalyst means to
explain this resistance; for him it is secret and deep, it comes
from afar; it has its roots in the very thing which the psy-
choanalyst is trying to make clear.
Furthermore it is equally impossible to explain the re-
sistance as emanating from the complex which the psycho-
analyst wishes to bring to light. The complex as such is
rather the collaborator of the psychoanalyst since it aims at
expressing itself in clear consciousness, since it plays tricks/
on the censor and seeks to elude it. The only level on which
we can locate the refusal of the subject is that of the censor.
It alone can comprehend the questions or the revelations of
the psychoanalyst as approaching more or less near to the
real drives which it strives to repress — it alone because it
alone knows what it is repressing.
If we reject the language and the materialistic mythology
of psychoanalysis, we perceive that the censor in order to
apply its activity with discernment must know what it is re-
pressing. In fact if we abandon all the metaphors represent-
ing the repression as the impact of blind forces, we are com-
pelled to admit that the censor must choose and in order to
choose must be aware of so doing. How could it happen
otherwise that the censor allows lawful sexual impulses to
pass through, that it permits needs (hunger, thirst, sleep)
to be^ expressed in clear consciousness? And how are we to
explain that it can relax its surveillance, that it can even be
deceived by the disguises of the instinct? But it is not suffi-
cient that it discern the condemned drives; it must also ap-
prehend them as to be repressed, which implies in it at the -
very least an awareness of its activity. In a word, how could
the censor discern the impulses needing to be repressed
without being conscious of discerning them? How can we
conceive of a knowledge which is ignorant of itself? To
know is to know that one knows, said Alain. Let us say
rather: All knowing is consciousness of knowing. Thus the
resistance of the patient implies on the level of the censor
an awareness of the thing repressed as such, a comprehen-
sion of the end toward which the questions of the psycho-
an^yst are leading, and an act of synthetic connection by
which it compares the truth of the repressed complex to
6 psychoanalytic hypothesis which aims at it. These vari- ,
94
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ous operations in their turn imply that the censor is con-
scious (of) itself. But what, type of self-consciousness can
the censor have? It must be the consciousness (of) being
conscious of the drive to be repressed, but precisely in order
not to be conscious of it. What does this mean if not that the
censor is in bad faith?
Psychoanalysis has not gained anything for us since in
order to overcome bad faith, it has established between the
unconscious and consciousness an autonomous consciousness
in bad faith. The effort to establish a veritable duality and
even a trinity {Es, Ich, Ueberich expressing themselves
through the censor) has resulted in a mere verbal tcrminol-
“ogy. The very essence of the reflexive idea of hiding some-
thing from oneself implies the unity of one and the same
psychic mechanism and consequently a double activity in the
heart of unity, tending on the one Jiand to maintain and
locate the thing to be concealed and on the other hand to
repress and disguise it. Each • of the* two aspects of this ac-
tivity is complementary to the other; that is, it implies the
other in its being. By separating consciousness from the un-
conscious by means of the censor, psychoanalysis has not
succeeded in dissociating the two phases of the act, since
the libido is a blind conatus toward conscious expression
and since the conscious phenomenon is a passive, faked re-
sult. Psychoanalysis has merely localized this double activity
of repulsion and attraction on the level of the censor.
Furthermore the problem still remains of accounting for
the unity of the total phenomenon (repression of the drive
which disguises itself and “passes” in symbolic form), to
establish comprehensible connections among its different
phases. How can .the repressed drive “disguise itself” if it
does not include (1) the consciousness of being repressed,
(2) the consciousness of having been pushed back because
it is what it is, (3) a project of disguise? No mechanistic
theop^ of condensation or of ^ansference can explain these
modifications by which the ®ve itself is affected, for the
description of the process of disguise implies a veiled ap-
peal to finality. And similarly how are we to account for
Ae pleasure or the anguish which accompanies the sym-
bolic and conscious satisfaction of the drive if consciousness
does not include — ^beyond the censor — an obscure compre-
hension of - the end to be attained as simultaneously desired
and forbidden? By rejecting the conscious unity of the psy-
•BAD FAITH
95
che, Freud is obliged to imply ever5where a magic unity
linking distant phenomena across obstacles, just as sympa-
thetic magic unites the spellbound person and the wax image
fashioned in his likeness. The imconscious drive (Trieb)
through ndagic is endowed with the character “repressed” or
“condemned,” which completely pervades it, colors it, and
magically provokes its symbolism. Similarly the conscious
phenomenon is entirely colored by its symbolic meaning al-
though it can not apprehend this meaning by itself in clear
consciousness.
Aside from its , inf eriority in principle, the explanation by,-
magic does not avoid the coexistence — on the level of the',
unconscious, on that of the censor, and on that of conscious-
ness — of two contradictory, complementary structures which
reciprocally imply and destroy each other. Proponents of the ‘
theory have hypostasized and “reified” bad faith; they have
not escaped it. This is what has inspired a Viennese psy-
chiatrist," Stekel, to depart from the psychoanalytical tradi-
'tion and to write in La femme frigide:^ “Every time that I
have been able to carry my investigations far enough, I have
established that the crux of the psychosis was conscious.” In
addition the cases which he reports in his work bear witness
to a pathological bad faith which the Freudian doctrine can
not account for. There is the question, for example, of wom-
en whom marital infidelity has made frigid; that is, they
succeed in hiding froin themselves not complexes deeply
sunk in half physiological darkness, but acts of conduct
which are objectively discoverable, which they can not fall
. to record at the moment when they perform them. Frequent-
ly in fact the husband reveals to Stekel that his wife has
•^ven objective signs of pleasure, but the woman when ques-
tioned will fiercely deny them. Here we find a pattern of
distraction. Admissions which Stekel was able to draw out
inform us that these pathologically frigid women apply them-
selves to becoming distracted in advance from the pleasure
which they dread; many for example at the time of the sex-
ual act, turn their thoughts away toward their daily occupa-
tions, make up their household accounts. Will anyone speak
of an unconscious here? Yet if the frigid woman thus dis-
tracts her consciousness from the pleasure which she experi-
ences, it is by no means cynically and in fuU agreement with
herself; it is in order to prove to herself that she is frigid.
® Paris: GaUimard.
96 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
We have in fact to deal with a phenomenon of bad faith
since the efforts taken in order not to be present to the ex-
perienced pleasure imply the recognition that the pleasure
is experienced; they imply it in order to deny it. But we
are no longer on the ground of psychoanalysis. Thus on the
one hand the explanation by means of the unconscious, due
to the fact that it breaks the psychic unity, can not account
for the facts which at first sight it appeared to explain. And
on the other hand, there exists an infinity of types of be-
havior in bad faith which explicitly reject this kind of ex-
planation because their essence implies that they can appear
only in the translucency of consciousness. We find that the
problem which we had attempted to resolve is still un-
touched.
n. PATTERNS OF BAD FAITH
If we wish to get out of this difficulty, we should examine
more closely the patterns of bad faith and attempt a de-
scription of them. This description will permit us perhaps to
fix more exactly the conditions for the ^possibility of bad
faith; that is, to reply to the question we raised at the out-
set: “What must be the being of man if he is to be capable
of bad faith?”
Take the example of a woman who has consented to go
out with a particular man for the first time. She knows very
well the intentions which the man who is speaking to her
cherishes regarding her. She knows also that it will be nec-
essary sooner or later for her to make a decision. But she
does not want to realize the urgency; she concerns herself
only with what is respectful and discreet in the attitude of
her companion. She does not apprehend this conduct as an
attempt to achieve what we call “the first approach”; that
is, she does not want to see possibilities of temporal devel-
opment which his^ conduct presents. She restricts this be-
havior to what is in the present; she does not wish to read
in the phrases which he addresses to her anything other than
their explicit meaning. If he says to her, “I find you so at-
tractive!” she disarms this phrase of its sexual background;
She attaches to the conversation and to the behavior of the
^ V meanings, which she imagines as ob-
1 ve qualities. The man who is speaking to her appears
BAD FAITH
97
to her sincere and respectful as the table is round or square,
as the wall coloring is blue or gray. The qualities thus at-
tached to the person she is listening to are in this way fixed
■ in a permanence like that of things, which is no other than
the projection of the strict present of the qualities into the
temper^ flux. Thk is because she does not quite know what
she wants. She is profoundly aware of the desire which she
inspires, but the desire cruel and naked would humiliate and
horrify her. Yet she would find no charm in a respect which
would be only respect. In order to satisfy her, there must be
a feeling which is addressed wholly to her personality — z.e.,
to her full freedom — and which would be a recognition of
her freedorn. But at the same time this feeling must be
wholly desire; that is, it must address itself to her body as
object This time then she refuses to apprehend the desire
for what it is; she does not even give it a name; she recog-
nizes it only to the extent that it transcends itself toward
admiration, esteem, respect and that it is wholly absorbed
in the more refined forms which it produces, to the extent
of no longer figuring anymore as a sort of warmth and densi-
ty. But then suppose he takes her hand. This act of her
companion risks changing the situation by calling for an
immediate decision. To leave the hand there is to consent in
herself to flirt, to engage herself. To withdraw it is to break
the troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its
charm. The aim is to postpone the moment of decision as
. long as possible. We know what happens next; the young
woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that
-she is leaving it. She does not notice because it happens by
chance that she is at this moment all intellect. She draws
her companion up to the most lofty regions of sentimental
speculation; she speaks of Life, of her life, she shows her-
self in her essential aspect — a personality, a consciousness,
^d during this time the divorce of the body from the soul
is accomplished; the - hand rests inert between the warm
hands of her companion — neither consenting nor resisting
— a thing.
^ We shall say that this woman is in bad faith. But we see
immediately that she uses various procedures in order to
maintain herself in this bad faith. She has disarmed the ac-
tions of her companion by reducing them to being only
what they are; that is, to existing in the mode of the in-
itself. But she permits herself to enjoy his desire, to the ex-
98 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
tent that she will apprehend it as not being what it is,
will recognize its transcendence. Finally while sensing pro-
foundly the presence of her own body — to the point of
being aroused, perhaps — ^she realizes herself as not being her
own body, and she contemplates it as though from above
as a passive object to which events can happen but which
can neither provoke them nor avoid them because all its
possibilities are outside of it. What unity do we find in
these various aspects of bad faith? It is a certain art of form-
ing contradictory concepts which unite in themselves both
an idea and the negation of that idea. The basic concept
which is thus engendered utilizes the double property of
the human being, who is at once a facticity and a transcen-
dence. These two aspects of human reality are and ought
to be capable of a valid coordination. But bad faith does
not wish either to coordinate them or to surmount them
in a synthesis. Bad faith seeks to affirm their identity while
preserving their differences. It must affirm facticity as being
transcendence and transcendence as being facticity, in such
a way that at the instant when a person apprehends the one,
he can find himself abruptly faced with the other.
We can find the prototype of formulae of bad faith in
certain famous expressions which have been rightly con-
ceived to produce their whole effect in a spirit of bad faith.
Take for example the title of a work by Jacques Chardonne,
Love Is Much More than Love.^ We see here how unity is
established between present love in its facticity — “the con-
tact of two skins,” sensuality, egoism, Proust’s mechanism
of jealousy, Adler’s battle of the sexes, etc. — and love as
transcendence — ^Mauriac’s “river of fire,” the longing for the
m fini te, Plato’s eras, Lawrence’s deep cosmic intuition, etc.
Here we leave facticity to find ourselves suddenly beyond
the present and the factual condition of man, beyond the
psychological, in the heart of metaphysics. On the other
hand, the title of a play by Sarment, I Am Too Great for
Myself,^ which also presents characters in bad faith, throws
us first into full transcendence in order suddenly to imprison
us within the narrow lunits of our factual essence. We will
discover this structure again in the famous sentence; “He
has become what he was” or in its no less famous opposite:
^L’ amour, c’est beaucoup plus que V amour,
5/e suis trap grand pour mol.
BAD FAITH
99
“Eternity pt last changes, each man into himself.”® It is well
understood that these various formulae have only the ap-
pearance of bad faith; they have been conceived in this
paradoxical form explicitly, to shock the mind and discoun-
tenance it by an enigma. But it is precisely this appearance
which is of concern to us. What counts here is that the for-
mulae do not constitute new, solidly structured ideas; on the
contrary, they are formed so as to remain in perpetual dis-
integration and so that we may slide at any time from nat-
uralistic present to transcendence and vice versa.
We can see the use which bad faith can make of these
judgments which all aim at establishing that I am not what
I am. If I were only what I am, I could, for example, seri-
ously consider an adverse criticism which someone makes of
me, question myself scrupulously, and perhaps be compelled
to recognize the truth in it. But thanks to transcendence, I
am not subject to all that I am. I do hot even have to dis-
cuss the justice of the reproach. As Suzanne says to Figaro,
“To prove that I am right would be to recognize that I can
be wrong.” I am on a plane where no reproach can touch
me since what I really am is my transcendence. I flee from
myself, I escape myself, I leave my tattered garment in the
hands of the fault-finder. But the ambiguity necessary for
bad faith comes from the fact that I aflhm here that I am
my transcendence in the mode of being of a thing. It is only
thus, in fact, that I can feel that I escape all reproaches. It
is in the sense that our young woman purifies the desire of
anything humiliating by being willing to consider it only
zs pure transcendence, which she avoids even naming. But
inversely “I Am Too Great for Myself,” while showing our
hanscendence changed into faclicity, is the source of an
infinity of excuses for our failures or our weaknesses. Simi-
larly the young coquette maintains transcendence to the ex-
tent that the respect, the esteem manifested by the actions
of her admirer are already on the plane of the transcendent.
But she arrests this transcendence, she glues it down with
all the facticity of the present; respect is nothing other than
respect, it is an arrested surpassing which no longer sur-
passes itself toward anything.
But although this metastable concept of “transcendence-
facticity” is one of the most basic instruments of bad faith,
est devenu ce qu'il itait.
Tel qu’en luUmeme enfin I’dternite le change.
100 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
it is not the only one of its kind. We can equally weU use
another kind of duplicity derived from human reality which
we will express roughly by saying that its being-for-itself
implies complementarily a being-for-others. Upon any one
of my conducts it is always possible to converge two looks,
mine and that of the Other. The conduct will not present
exactly the same structure in each case. But as we shall see
later, as each look perceives it, there is between these two
aspects of my being, no difference between appearance and
being — as if I were to my self the truth of myself and as if
the Other possessed only a deformed image of me. The equal
dignity of being, possessed by my being-for-others and by
my being-for-myself, permits a perpetually disintegrating syn-
thesis and a perpetual game of escape from the for-itself to
the for-others and from the for-others to the for-itself. We
have seen also the use which our young lady made of our
being-in-the-midst-of-the-world — i.e., of our inert presence
as a passive object among other objects — ^in order to relieve
herself suddenly from the functions of her being-in-the
world — ^that is, from the being which causes there to be a
world by projecting itself beyond the world toward its own
possibilities. Let us note finally the confusing syntheses which
play on the nihilating ambiguity of these temporal ekstases,
affirming at once that I am what I have been (the man who
deliberately arrests himself at one period in his life and
refuses to take into consideration the later changes) and
that I am not what I have been (the man who in the face
of reproaches or rancor dissociates himself from his past by
insisting on his freedom and on his perpetual re-creation).
In all these concepts, which have only a transitive role in
the reasoning and which are eliminated from the conclusion
(like the imaginaries in the computations of physicists), we
find^ again the same structure. We have to deal with human
reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not
what it is.
But what exactly is necessary in order for these concepts
of ^ disinte^ation to be able to receive even a pretence of
existence, in order for them to be able to appear for an in-
stant to consciousness, even in a process of evanescence? A
qu^k ejmmination of the idea of sincerity, the antithesis of
bad faith, will be very_ instructive in 'this connection. Actu-
a y smcerity presents itself as a demand and consequently
IS not a state. Now what is the ideal to be attained in this
BAD FAITH
101
case? It is necessary that a man be for himself only what he
is. But is this not precisely the definition of the in-itself —
or if you prefer — the principle of identity? To posit as an
ideal the being of things, is this not to assert by the same
stroke that this being does not belong to human reality and
that the principle of identity, far from being a universal
axiom universally applied, is only a synthetic principle en-
joying a merely regional universality? Thus in order that
the concepts of bad iaith can put us under illusion at least
for an instant, in order that the candor of “pure hearts”
(cf. Gide, Kessel) can have validity for human reality as
an ideal, the principle of identity must not represent a con-
stitutive principle of human reality and human reality must
not be necessarily what it is but must be able to be what it
is not What does this mean?
If man is what he is, bad faith is forever impossible and
candor ceases to be his ideal and becomes instead his being.
But is man what he is? And more generally, how can he
be what he is when he exists as consciousness of being? If
candor or sincerity is a universal value, it is evident that the
maxim “one must be what one is” does not serve solely as a
regulating principle for judgments and concepts by which
I express what I am. It posits not merely an ideal of know-
ing but an ideal of being; it proposes for us an absolute
equivalence of being with itself as a prototype of being. In
this sense it is necessary that we make ourselves what we
are But what are we then if we have the constant obligation
to make ourselves what we are, if our mode of being is hav-
ing the obligation to be what we are?
Let us consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is
quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He
comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He
bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express
an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the cus-
tomer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk
the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while car-
rying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker
y putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken
equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light
movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to
^ a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as
they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his
gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives
102 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is
playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We
need not watch long before we can explain it. he is playing
at being a waiter in a cafe. There is nothing there to sur-
prise us. The game is a kind of marking out and investiga-
tion. The child plays with his body in order to explore it,
to take inventory of it; the waiter in the cafd^ plays with Ws
condition in order to realize it. This obligation is not dif-
ferent from that which is imposed on all tradesmen. Their
condition is wholly one of ceremony. The public demands
of them that they realize it as a ceremony; there is the dance
of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they
endeavor to persuade their clientele that they are nothing
but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is
offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a
grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function
as a grocer, just as the soldier at attention makes himself
into a soldier-thing with a direct regard which does not see
at all, which is no longer meant to see, since it is the rule
and not the interest of the moment which determines the
point he must fix his eyes on (the sight “fixed at ten paces”)*
There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in
what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might
escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly
elude his condition.
In a parallel situation, from within, the waiter in the cafe
can not be immediately a cafe waiter in the sense that this
inkwell is an inkwell, or the glass is a glass. It is by no
means that he can not form reflective judgments or concepts
concerning his condition. He knows well what it “means”:
the obligation of getting up at five o’clock, of sweeping the
floor of the shop before the restaurant opens, of starting
the coffee pot going, etc. He knows the rights which it al-
lows: the right to the tips, the right to belong to a union,
etc. But all these concepts, all these judgments refer to the
transcendent. It is a matter of abstract possibilities, of rights
and duties conferred on a “person possessing rights.” And
It js precisely this person who I have to be (if I am the
waiter in question) and who I am not. It is not that I do
not wish to be this person or that I want this person to be
^ent. But rather there is no common measure between
his being and mine. It is a “representation” for others and
tor myself, which means that I can be he only in representa-
BAD FAITH
103
tion. But if I represent myself as him, I am not he; I am
separated from him as the object from the subject, separated
by nothing, but this nothing isolates me from him. I can
not be he, I can only play at being him; that is, imagine to
myself that I am he. And thereby I affect him with nothing-
ness. In vain do I fulJBll the functions of a cafe waiter. I can
be he only in the neutralized mode, as the actor is Hamlet,
by mechanically making the typical gestures of my state and
by aiming at myself as an imaginary cafe waiter through
those gestures taken as an “analogue.”'’^ What I attempt to
realize is a being-in-itself of the cafe waiter, as if it were not
just in my power to confer their value' and their urgency
upon my duties and the rights of my position, as if it were
not my free choice to get up each morning at five o’clock or
to remain in bed, even though it meant getting fired. As if
from the very fact that I sustain this role in existence I did
not transcend it on every side,.^as if I did not constitute
myself as one beyond my condition. Yet there is no doubt
that I flm in a sense a cafe waiter-otherwise could I not just
as well call myself a diplomat or a reporter? But if am one,
this can not be in the mode of being in-itself. I am a waiter
in the mode of being what I am not.
Furthermore we are dealing with more than mere social
positions; I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of
my actions. The good speaker is the one who plays at speak-
ing, because he can not be speaking. The attentive pupil
who wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher,
his ears wide open, so exhausts himself in playing the at-’
tentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything.
Fep)etually absent to my body, to my acts, I am despite my-
self that “divine absence” of which Valery speaks. I can not
say either that I am here or that I am not here, in the sense
, ^ “that box of matches is on the table”; this
would be to confuse my “being-in-the-world” with a “being-
Jn- e-midst-of-the-world.” Nor that I am standing, nor that
am seated; this would be to confuse my body with the idio-
yncratic totality of which it is only one of the structures. On
sides I escape being and yet— I am.
am ^ mode of being which concerns only myself: I
, • One might think that surely I am the sadness in the
P'^j'c^o/og/e pMnomSnologique de Vimagmatwn. Paris:
194S.] ’ ■ Psychology of Imagination. Philosophical Library.
104
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
mode of being what I am. What is the sadness, however, if
not the intentional unity which comes to reassemble and
animate the totality of my conduct? It is the meaning of
this dull look with which I view the world, of my bowed
shoulders, of my lowered head, of the listlessness in my
whole body. But at the very moment when I adopt each of
these attitudes, do I not know that I shall not be able to
hold on to it? Let a stranger suddenly appear and I will lift
up my head, I will assume a lively cheerfulness. What will
remain of my sadness except that I obligingly promise it an
appointment for later after the departure of the visitor?
Moreover is not this sadness itself a conduct? Is it not con-
sciousness which affects itself with sadness as a magical re-
course against a situation too urgent?® And in this case even,
should we not say that being sad means first to make oneself
sad? That may be, someone will say, but after all doesn’t
giving oneself the being of sadness mean to receive this
being? It makes no difference from where I receive it. The
fact is that a consciousness which affects itself with sadness
is sad precisely for this reason. But it is difiicult to compre-
hend the nature of consciousness; the being-sad is not a
ready-made being which I give to myself as I can give this
book to my friend. I do not possess the property of affecting
myself with being. If I make myself sad, I must continue
to make myself sad from beginning to end. I can not treat
my sadness as an impulse finally achieved and put it on file
without re-creating it, nor can I carry it in the manner of an
inert body which continues its movement after the initial
shock. There is no inertia in consciousness. If I make myself
sad, it is because I am not sad — ^the being of the sadness es-
capes me by and in the very act by which I affect myself
with it. The being-in-itself of sadness perpetually haunts my
consciousness (of) being sad, but it is as a value which I
can not realize; it stands as a regulative meaning of my sad-
ness, not as its constitutive modality.
Someone may say that my consciousness at least is, what-
ever may be the object or the state of which it makes itself
consciousness. But how do we distinguish my consciousness
(of) being sad from sadness? Is it not all one? It is true in
a way that my consciousness is, if one means by this that
or another it is a part of the totality of being on which
Sfisgujjse d’ttne z/ieor/e des emotions. Paris: Hermann. 1939. In English
The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. Philosophical Library. 1948.
BAD FAITH
105
judgments can be brought to bear. But it should be noted, as
Husserl clearly understood, that my consciousness appears
originally to the Other as an absence. It is the object always
present as the meaning of all my attitudes and all my con-
duct— and always absent, for it gives itself to the intuition
of another as a perpetual question — still better, as a per-
petual freedom. When Pierre looks at me, I know of course
that he is looking at me. His eyes, things in the world, are
fixed on my body, a thing in the world — ^that is the objec-
tive fact of which ! can say: it is. But it is also a fact in the
world. The rheaning of this look is not a fact in the world,
and this is what makes me uncomfortable. Although I make
smiles, promises, threats, nothing can get hold of the ap-
probation, the free judgment which I seek; I know that it is
always beyond. I sense it in my very attitude, which is no
longer like that of the worker toward the things he uses as
instruments. My reactions, to the extent that I project myself
toward the Other, are no longer for myself but are rather
mere presentations; they await being constituted as graceful
or uncouth, sincere or insincere, etc., by an apprehension
which is always beyond my efforts to provoke, an apprehen-
sion which will be provoked by my efforts only if of itself
it lends them force (that is, only in so far as it causes itself
to be provoked from the outside), which is its own mediator
with the transcendent. Thus the objective fact of the being-
in-itself of the Other’s consciousness is posited in order
to disappear in negativity and in freedom: the Other’s con-
sciousness is as not-being; its being-in-itself “here and now”
is not-to-be.
The Other’s consciousness is what it is not.
Furthermore the being of my own consciousness does not
appear lo me as the consciousness of the Other. It is because
U makes itself, since its being is consciousness of being. But
IS means that making sustains being; consciousness has to
e Its own being, it is never sustained by being; it sustains
eing^ in the heart of subjectivity, which means once again
^t It is inhabited by being but that it is not being: con-
sciousness is not what it is.
th these conditions what can be the significance of
sincerity except as a task impossible to achieve,
turp ■'^ery meaning is in contradiction with the struc-
consciousness. To be sincere, we said, is to be
Quc is. That supposes that I am not originally what
106 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
I am. But here naturally Kant’s “You ought, therefore you
can” is implicitly understood. I can become sincere; this is
what my duty and my effort to achieve sincerity imply. But
we definitely establish that the original structure of “not
being what one is” renders impossible in advance all move-
ment toward being in itself or “being what one is.” And
this impossibility is not hidden from consciousness; on the
contrary, it is the very stuff of consciousness; it is the em-
barrassing constraint which we constantly experience; it is our
very incapacity to recognize ourselves, to constitute ourselves
as being what we are. It is this necessity which means that,
as soon as we posit ourselves as a certain being, by a legiti-
mate judgment, based on inner experience or correctly de-
duced from a priori or empirical premises, then by that
very positing we surpass this being — and that not toward
another being but toward emptiness, toward nothing.
How then can we blame another for not being sincere or
rejoice in our own sincerity since this sincerity appears to us
at the same time to be impossible? How can we in conversa-
tion, in confession, in introspection, even attempt sincerity
since the effort will by its very nature be doomed to failure
and since at the very time when we announce it we have a
prejudicative comprehension of its futility? In introspection
I try to determine exactly what I am, to make up my mind
to be my true self without delay — even though it means
consequently to set about searching for ways to change ray-
self. But what does this mean if not that I am constituting
myself as a thing? Shall I determine the ensemble of pur-
poses and motivations which have pushed me to do this or
that^ action? But this is already to postulate a causal deter-
minism which constitutes the flow of my states of conscious-
ness as a succession of physical states. Shall T uncover in
myself drives,” even though it be to afiSrm them in shame?
But^ is this not deliberately to forget that these drives are
reali^d with my consent, that they are not forces of nature
but that I lend them their efficacy by a perpetually renewed
decision concerning their value? ShaU I pass judgment on
my character, on my nature? Is this not to veil from myself
at that moment what I know only too well, that I thus judge
a past to which by definition my present is not subject? The
same man who in sincerity posits
that he IS what in actuality he was, is indignant at the re-
proach of another and tries to disarm it by asserting that he
BAD FAITH
107
can no longer be what he was. We are readily astonished
and upset when the penalties of the court affect a man who
in his new. freedom is no longer the guilty person he was.
But at the same time we require of this man that he recog-
nize himself as being this guilty one. What then is sincerity
except precisely a phenomenon of bad faith? Have we not
shown indeed that in bad faith human reality is constituted
as a being which is what it is not and which is not what
it is?
Let us take an example: A homosexual frequently has an
intolerable feeling of guilt, and his whole existence is de-
termined in relation to this feeling. One will readily foresee
that he is in bad faith. In fact it frequently happens that
this man, while recognizing his homosexual inclination, while
avowing each and every particular misdeed which he has
committed, refuses with all his strength to consider himself
"a paederast." His case is always “different,” peculiar; there
enters into it something of a game, of chance, of bad luck;
the mistakes are all in the past; they are explained by a cer-
tain conception of the beautiful which women can not sat-
isfy; we should see in them the results of a restless search,
rather than the manifestations of a deeply rooted tendency,
etc., etc. Here is assuredly a man in bad faith who borders
on the comic since, acknowledging all the facts which are
imputed to him, he refuses to draw from them the conclu-
sion which they impose. His friend, who is his most severe
critic, becomes irritated with this duplicity. The critic asks
only one thing — and perhaps then he will show himself in-
dulgent: that the guilty one recognize himself as guilty, that
the homosexual declare frankly — whether humbly or boast-
fully matters little — ^“1 am a paederast.” We ask here: Who
IS in bad faith? The homosexual or the champion of sin-
cerity?
The homosexual recognizes his faults, but he struggles
with all his strength against the crushing view that his mis-
t^es constitute for him a destiny. He does not wish to let
himself be considered as a thing. He has an obscure but
strong feeling that a homosexual is not a homosexual as
^ table is a table or as this red-haired man is red-haired,
tt seems to him that he has escaped from each mistake as
soon as he has posited it and recognized it; he even feels
at the psychic duration by itself cleanses him from each
hiisdeed, constitutes for him an undetermined future, causes
108 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
him to be born anew. Is he wrong? Does he not recognize
in himself the peculiar, irreducible character of human re-
ality? His attitude includes then an undeniable comprehen-
sion of truth. But at the same time he needs this perpetual
rebirth, this constant escape in order to live; he must con-
stantly put himself beyond reach in order to avoid the ter-
rible judgment of collectivity. Thus he plays on the word
being. He would be right actually if he understood the
phrase “I am not a paederast” in the sense of “I am not
what I am.” That is, if he declared to himself, “To the ex-
tent that a pattern of conduct is defined as the conduct of a
paederast and to the extent that I have adopted this con-
duct, I am a paederast. But to the extent that human reality
can not be finally defined by patterns of conduct, I am not
one.” But instead he slides surreptitiously toward a different
connotation of the word “being.” He understands “not be-
ing” in the sense of “not-being-in-itself.” He lays claim to
“not being a paederast” in the sense in which this table
is not an inkwell. He is in bad faith.
But the champion of sincerity is not ignorant of the tran-
scendence of human reality, and he knows how at need to
appeal to it for his own advantage. He makes use of it even
and brings it up in the present argument. Does he not wish,
first in the name of sincerity, then of freedom, that the ho-
mosexual reflect on himself and acknowledge himself as a
homosexual? Does he not let the other understand that such
a confession will win indulgence for him? What does this
mean if not that the man who will acknowledge himself as
a homosexual will no longer be the same as the homosexual
whom he acknowledges being and that he will escape into
the region of freedom and of good will? The critic asks
the man then to be what he, is in order no longer to be what
he is. It is the profound meaning of the saying, “A sin con-
fessed is half pardoned.” The critic demands of the guilty
one that he constitute himself as a thing, precisely in order
no longer to treat him as a thing. And this contradiction is
constitutive^ of the demand of sincerity. Who can not see
how offensive to the Other and how reassuring for me is a
statenient such as, “He’s just a paederast,” which removes a
disturbmg freedom from a trait and which aims at hence-
orth constituting all the acts of the Other as consequences
o owing strictly from his essence. That is actually what the
critic IS demanding of his victim— that he constitute himself
BAD FAITH
109
as a thing, -that he should entrust his freedom to his friend
as a fief, in order that the friend should return it to him sub-
sequently — ^like a suzerain to ^ his vassal. The champion of
sincerity is in bad faith to the degree that in order to re-
assure himself, he pretends to judge, to the extent that he
demands that freedom as freedom constitute itself as a thing.
We have here only one episode in that battle to the death
of consciousnesses which Hegel calls “the relation of the
master and the slave.” A person appeals to another and de-
mands that in the name of his nature as consciousness he
should radically destroy himself as consciousness, but v/hile
making this appeal he leads the other to hope for a rebirth
beyond this destruction.
Very well, someone will say, but our man is abusing sin-
cerity, playing one side against the other. We should not
look for sincerity in the relation of the tnit-sein but rather
where it is pure — ^in the relations of a person with himself.
But who can not see that objective sincerity is constituted
in the same way? Who can not see that the sincere man con-
stitutes himself as a thing in order to escape the condition
of a thing by the same act of sincerity? The man who con-
fesses that he is evil has exchanged his disturbing “freedom-
for-evil” for an inanimate character of evil; he is evil, he
clings to himself, he is what he is. But by the same stroke,
he escapes from that thing, since it is he who contemplates
it, since it depends on him to maintain it under his glance
or to let it collapse in an infinity of particular acts. He de-
rives a merit from his sincerity, and the deserving man is not
the evil man as he is evU but as he is beyond his evilness.
At the same time the evil is disarmed since it is nothing,
save on the plane of determinism, and since in confessing
it, I posit my freedom in respect to it; my future is virgin;
everything is allowed to me.
Thus the essential structure of sincerity does not differ
from that of bad faith since the sincere man constitutes him-
self as what he is in order not to be it. This explains the
truth reco^ized by all that one can fall into bad faith
through being sincere. As Valery - pointed out, this is the
^e with Stendhal. Total, constant sincerity as a constant
effort to adhere to oneself is by nature a constant effort to
dissociate oneself from oneself. A person frees himself from
irnself by the very act by which he makes himself an object
or himself. To draw up a perpetual inventory of what one
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
110
is means constantly to redeny oneself and to take refuge in
a sphere where one is no longer anything but a pure, free
regard. The goal of bad faith, as we said, is to put oneself
out of reach; it is an escape. ISIow we see that we must use
the same terms to define sincerity. What does this mean?
In the final analysis the goal of sincerity and the goal of
bad faith are not so difi[erent To be sure, there is a sin-
cerity which bears on the past and which does not concern
us here; I am sincere if I confess having had this pleasure
or that intention. We shall see that if this sincerity is pos-
sible, it is because in his fall into the past, the being of man
is constituted as a being-in-itself. But here our concern is
only with the sincerity which aims at itself in present im-
manence. What is its goal? To bring me to confess to my-
self what I am in order that I may finally coincide with my
being; in a word, to cause myself to be, in the mode of the
in-itself, what I am in the mode of “not being what I am.”
Its assumption is that fundamentally I am already, in the
mode of the in-itself, what I have to be. Thus we find at
the base of sincerity a continual game of mirror and reflec-
tion, a perpetual passage from the being which is what it is
to the being which is not what it is and inversely from the
being which is not what it is to the being which is what it
is. And what is the goal of bad faith? To cause me to be
what I am, in the mode of “not being what one is,” or not
to be what I am in the mode of “being what one is.” We
find here the same game of mirrors. In fact in order for me
to have an intention of sincerity, I must at the outset simul-
taneously be and not be what I am. Sincerity does not assign
to me a mode of being or a particular quality, but in relation
to that quality it aims at making me pass from one mode of
being to another mode of being. This second mode of being,
the ideal of sincerity, I am prevented by nature from attain-
ing; and at the very moment when I struggle to attain it, 'I
have a vague prejudicative comprehension that I shall not
attain it. But all the same, in order for me to be able to con-
ceive an intention^ in bad faith, I must have such a nature
that within nay being I escape from my being. If I were sad
OT cowardly in the way in which this inkwell is an inkwell,
e possibility of bad faith could not even be conceived,
should I be unable to escape from my being; I
could not even imagine that I could escape from it. But if
bad faith is possible by virtue of a simple project, it is be-
BAD FAITH
111
cause so far as my being is concerned, there is no diJfference
between being and non-being if I am cut off from my proj-
ect.
Bad faith is possible only because sincerity is conscious of
'missing its goal inevitably, due to its very nature. I can try
to apprehend myself as *‘not being cowardly,” when I am
so, only on condition that the “being cowardly” is itself
“in question” at the very moment when it exists, on condi-
tion that it is itself one question, that at the very moment
when I wish to apprehend it, it escapes me on all sides and
annihilates itself. The condition imder which I can attempt
an effort in bad faith is that in one sense, I am not this cow-
ard which I do not wish to be. But if I were not cowardly
' in the simple mode of not-being-what-one-is-not, I would
be “in good faith” by declaring that I am not cowardly.
Thus this inapprehensible coward is evanescent; in order
for me not to be cowardly, I must in some way also be cow-
ardly. That does not mean that I must be “a little” coward-
ly, in the sense that “a little” signifies “to a certain degree
cowardly — and not cowardly to a certain degree.” No. I
must at once both be and not be totally and in all respects
a coward. Thus in this case bad faith requires that I should
not be what I am; that is, that there be an imponderable
difference separating being from non-being in the mode of
being of human reality.
But bad faith is not restricted to denying the qualities
which I possess, to not seeing the being which I am. It at-
tempts also to constitute myself as being what I am not. It
apprehends me positively as courageous when I am not so.
And that is possible, once again, only if I am what I am not;
that is, if non-being in me does not have being even as non-
being. Of course necessarily I am not courageous; other-
wise bad faith would not be bad faith. But in addition my
effort in bad faith must include the ontological comprehen-
sion that even in my usual being what I am, I am not it
really and that there is no such difference between the being
of “being-sad,” for example — ^which I am in the mode of
not being what I am — and the “non-being” of not-being-
courageous which I wish to hide from myself. Moreover it
is particularly requisite that the very negation of being should
be itself the object of a perpetual nihilation, that the very
meaning of “non-being” be perpetually in question in hu-
man reality. If I were not courageous in the way in which
112 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
this inkwell is not a table; that is, if I were isolated in my
cowardice, propped firmly against it, incapable of putting
it in relation to its opposite, if I were not capable of de-
termining myself as cowardly — that is, to deny courage to
myself and thereby to escape my cowardice in the very mo-
ment that I posit it — if it were not on principle impossible
for me to coincide with my not-being-courageous as W'cll as
with my being-courageous — then any project of bad faith
would be prohibited me. Thus in order for bad faith to be
possible, sincerity itself must be in bad faith. The condition
of the possibility for bad faith is that human reality, in its
most immediate being, in the intra-slructurc of the pre-
reflective cogito, must be what it is not and not be what
it is.
m. THE “FAITH” OF BAD FAITH
We have indicated for the moment only those conditions
which render bad faith conceivable, the structures of being
which permit us to form concepts of bad faith. We can not
limit ourselves to these considerations; we have not yet dis-
tin^ished bad faith from falsehood, The two-faced concepts
which we have described would without a doubt be utilized
by a liar to discountenance his questioner, although their
two-faced quality being established on the being of man
and not on some empirical circumstance, can and ought to
be evident to all. The true problem of bad faith stems evi-
dently from the fact that bad faith is faith. It can not be
either a cynical lie or certainty — ^if certainty is the intuitive
possession of the object. But if we take belief as meaning
-the adherence of being to its object when the object is not
given or is given indistinctly, then bad faith is belief; and
the essential problem of bad faith is a problem of belief.
How can we believe by bad faith in the concepts which
we forge expressly to persuade ourselves? We' must note in
fact that the project of bad faith must be itself in bad faith.
I am not only in bad faith at the end of my effort when I
have constructed my two-faced concepts and when I have
persuaded myself. In truth, I have not persuaded myself;
to the extent that I could be so persuaded, I have always
been so. And at the very moment when I was disposed to
put myself in bad faith, I of necessity was in bad faith with
respec to this same disposition. For me to have represented
BAD FAITH
113
it to myself as bad faith would have been cynicism; to be-
lieve it sincerely innocent would have been in good faith.
The decision to be in bad faith does not dare to speak its
name; it believes itself and does not believe itself in bad
faith; it believes itself and does not believe itself in good
faith. It is this which, from the upsurge of bad faith, de-
termines the later attitude and, as it were, the Welt-
anschauung of bad faith.
Bad faith does not hold the norms and criteria of truth
as they are accepted by the critical thought of good faith.
What it decides first, in fact, is the nature of truth. With
bad faith a truth appears, a method of thinking, a type of
being which is like that of objects; the ontological charac-
teristic of the world of bad faith with which the subject
suddenly surrounds himself is this: that here being is what
it is noi and is not what it is. Consequently a peculiar type
of evidence appears: non-persuasive evidence. Bad faith ap-
prehends evidence but it is resigned in advance to not being
fulfilled by this evidence, to not being persuaded and trans-
formed into good faith. It makes itself humble and mod-
est; it is not ignorant, it says, that faith is decision and that
after each intuition, it must decide and will what it is. Thus
bad faith in its primitive project and in its coming into the
world decides on the exact nature of its requirements. It
stands forth in the firm resolution not to demand too much,
to count itself satisfied when it is barely persuaded, to force
itself in decisions to adhere to uncertain truths. This orig-
inal project of bad faith is a decision in bad faith on the
nature of faith. Let us understand clearly that there is no
question of a reflective, voluntary decision, but of a sponta-
neous determination of om being. One puts oneself in bad
faith as one goes to sleep and one is in bad faith as one
dreams. Once this mode of being has been realized, it is as
difiScult to get out of it as to wake oneself up; bad faith is
a type of being in the world, like waking or dreaming,
which by itself tends to perpetuate itself, although its struc-
ture is of the metastable type. But bad faith is conscious of
its structure, and it has taken precautions by deciding that
the metastable structure is the structure of being and that
non-persuasion is the structure of all convictions. It follows
that if bad faith is faith and if it includes in its original
project its own negation (it determines itself to be not quite
convinced in order to convince itself that I am what I am
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
114
not), then to start with, a faith which wishes itself to be
not quite convinced must be possible. What are the condi-
tions for the possibility of such a faith?
I believe that my friend Pierre feels friendship for me. I
believe it in good faith. I believe it but I do not have for
it any self-evident intuition, for the nature of the object does
not lend itself to intuition. I believe it; that is, I allow my-
self to give in to all impulses to trust it; I decide to believe
in it, and to maintain myself in this decision; I conduct my-
self, finally, as if I were certain of it — and all this in the
synthetic unity of one and the same attitude. This which I
define as good faith is what Hegel would call the immediate.
It is simple faith. Hegel would demonstrate at once that the
immediate calls for mediation and that belief, by becoming
belief for itself, passes to the state of non-belief. If I be-
lieve that my friend Pierre likes me, this means that his
friendship appears to me as the meaning of all his acts. Be-
lief is a particular consciousness of the meaning of Pierre’s
acts. But if I know that I believe, the belief appears to me as
pure subjective determination .. without external correlative.
This is what makes the very word “to believe” a term utilized
indifferently to indicate the unwavering firmness of belief
(“My God, I believe in you”) and its character as disarmed
and strictly subjective (“Is Pierre my friend? I do not
know; I believe so”). But the nature of consciousness is
such that in it the mediate and the immediate are one and
the same being. To believe is to know that one believes, and
to ^ow that one believes is no longer to believe. Thus to
believe is not to believe any longer because that is only to
believe this in the unity of one and the same non-thetic
self-consciousness. To be sure, we have here forced the de-
scnption of the phenomenon by designating it with the
word^ to know; non-thetic consciousness is not to know.
But It is in its very translucency at the origin of all know-
ing. Thus the non-thetic consciousness (of) believing is de-
s rue ive of belief. But at the same time the very law of the
implies that the being of believing ought
to be the consciousness of believing.
which questions its own being,
", ■'if f®- <iestruotion, which can
for wSch It ^
To believp 5 ^ to and to appear is to deny itself,
10 beheve ,s not-to-bcheve. We see the reason for it; the
BAD FAITH
115
being of consciousness is to exist by itself, then to make
itself be and thereby to pass beyond itself. In this sense con-
sciousness is perpetually escaping itself, belief becomes non-
belief, the immediate becomes mediation, the absolute be-
comes relative, and the relative becomes absolute. The ideal
of good faith (to believe what one believes) is, like that of
sincerity (to be what one is), an ideal of being-in-itself.
Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly be-
lieves what' one believes. Consequently the primitive project
of bad faith is only the utilization of this self-destruction
of the fact of consciousness. If every belief in good faith is
an impossible belief, then there is a place for every impos-
sible belief. My inability to believe that I am courageous
will not discourage me since every belief involves not quite
believing. I shall define this impossible belief as my belief.
To be sure, I shall not be able to hide from myself that I
believe in order not to believe and that I do not believe
in order to believe. But the subtle, total annihilation of bad
faith fay itself can not surprise me; it exists at the basis of
all faith. 'What is it then? At the moment when I wish to
believe myself courageous I know that I am a coward. And
this certainly would come to destroy my belief. But first,
I am not any more courageous than cowardly, if we are to
understand this in the mode of being of the in-itself. In
the second place, I do not know that I am courageous; such
a view of myself can be accompanied only by belief, for it
surpasses pure reflective certitude. In the third place, it is
very true that bad faith does not succeed in believing what
it wishes to believe. But it is precisely as the acceptance of
not believing what it believes that it is bad faith. Good faith
wishes to flee the “not-believing-what-one-believes” by find-
ing refuge in being. Bad faith flees being by taking refuge
in “not-believing-what-one-believes.” It has disarmed all be-
liefs in advance — ^those which it would like to take hold of
and, by the same stroke, the others, those which it wishes to
flee. In willing this self-destruction of belief, from which
science escapes by searching for evidence, it ruins the beliefs
which are opposed to it, which reveal themselves as being
only belief. Thus we can better understand the original phe-
nomenon of bad faith-
In bad faith there is no cynical lie nor knowing prepara-
tion for deceitful concepts. But the first act of bad faith is
to flee what it can not flee,.^toJBee what it is. The very- ~
116
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ect of flight reveals to bad faith an inner disintegration in
the heart of being, and it is this disintegration which bad
faith wishes to be. In truth, the two immediate attitudes
which we can take in the face of our being are conditioned
by the very nature of this being and its immediate relation
with the in-itself. Good faith seeks to flee the inner disinte-
gration of my being in the direction of the in-itself which
it should be and is not. Bad faith seeks to flee the in-itself by
means of the inner disintegration of my being. But it denies
this very disintegration as it denies that it is itself bad faith.
Bad faith seeks by means of “not-being-what-one-is” to es-
cape from the in-itself which I am not in the mode of being
what one is not. It denies itself as bad faith and aims at the
in-itself which I am not in the mode of “not-being-what-
one-is-not.”® If bad faith is possible, it is because it is an
immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human
being; it is because consciousness conceals in its being a per-
manent risk of bad faith. The origin of this risk is the fact
that the nature of consciousness simultaneously is to be what
it is not and not to be what it is. In the light of these re-
marks we can now approach the ontological study of con-
sciousness, not as the totality of the human being, but as
the instantaneous nucleus of this being.
9 K it is indifferent whether one is in good or in bad faith, because
bad faith reapprehends good faith and slides to the very origin of the
project of good faith, that does not mean that we can not radically escape
bad faith. But this supposes a self-recovery of being which was previously
corrupted. This self-recovery we shall call authenticity, the description of
which has no place here.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
Immediate Stractures
of the For-Itself
I. PRESENCE TO SELF
Negation has referred us to freedom, freedom to bad faith,
and bad faith to the being of consciousness, whicb is the req-
uisite condition for the possibility of bad faith. In the light
of the requirements which we have established in the preced-
ing chapters, we must now resume the description which we
attempted in the Introduction of this work; that is, we must
return to the plane of the pre-reflective cogito. Now the
cogito never gives out anything other than what we
ask of it. Descartes questioned it concerning its functional
^£ct — “I doubt, 1 think” And because he wished to pass
without a conducting thread from this functional aspect to
existential dialectic, he fell into the error of substance.
Husserl, warned by this error, remained timidly on the plane
of functional description. Due to this fact he never passed
beyond the pure description of the appearance as such; he
n^ shut himself up inside the cogito and deserves — ^in spite
of his denial — ’to be called a phenomenalist rather than a
Phenomenologist His phenomenalism at every moment bor-
ers on Kantian idealism. Heidegger, wishing to avoid that
os^ptive phenomenalism which leads to the Megarian,
auhdidectic isolation of essences, begins with the existential
® yhc without going through the cogito. But since the
^£in has from the start been deprived of the dimension of
119
1
120 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
consciousness, it can never regain this dimension. Heidegger 1
endows human reality with a self-understanding which he
defines as an “ekstatic pro-ject” of its own possibilities. It' is ;
certainly not my intention to deny the existence of this proj- '
ect. But how could there be an understanding which would
not in itself be the consciousness (of) being understanding? ’
This ekstatic character of human reality will lapse into a thing-
like, blind in-itself unless it arises from the consciousness of '
ekstasis. In truth the cogito must be our point of departure,
but we can say of it, parodying a famous saying, that it leads
us only on condition that we get out of it. Our preceding '
study, which concerned the conditions for the possibility of i
certain types of conduct, had as its goal only to place us in a |
position to question the cogito about its being and to furnish ]
us with the dialectic instrument which would enable us to find '
in the cogito itself the means of escaping from instantaneity |
toward the totality of being which constitutes human reality.
Let us return now to description of non-thetic self-conscious-
ness; let us examine its results and ask what it means for con-
sciousness that it must necessarily be what it is not and not be
what it is.
“The being of consciousness,” we said in the Introduc- ;
tion, “is a being such that in its being, its being is in ques-
tion.” This means that the being of consciousness does not
coincide with itself in a full equivalence. Such equivalence,
which is that of the in-itself, is expressed by this simple for-
mula; being is what it is. In the in-itself there is not a particle
/of being which is not wholly within itself without distance.
When being is thus conceived there is not the slightest sus-
picion of duality in it; this is what we mean when we say that
the density of being of the in-itself is infinite. It is a fullness.
The principle of identity can be said to be synthetic not only
because it limits its scope to a region of definite being, but in
particular because it masses within it the infinity of density.
that A exists in an infinite compression with
an infinite density. Identity is the limiting concept of unifica-
tion. it IS not true that the in-itself has any need of a synthetic
uni cation of its being; at its own extreme limit, unity disap-
pears and passes into identity. Identity is the ideal of “one,”
and one conies into the world by human reality. The in-
^ plenitude can be
gmed, no more perfect equivalence of content to contain-
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 121
er. There is not the slightest emptiness in being, not the tiniest
crack through which nothingness might slip in.
The distinguishing characteristic of consciousness, on the
other hand, is that it is a decompression of being. Indeed
it is impossible to define it as coincidence with itself. Of this
table I can say only that it is purely and simply this table. But
I can not limit myself to saying that my belief is belief; my
belief is the consciousness (of) belief. It is often said that the
act of reflection alters the fact of consciousness on which it is
directed. Husserl himself admits that the fact “of being seen”
involves a total modification for each ErJebnis. But I believe
that I have demonstrated that the first condition of all reflec-
tion is a pre-reflective cogito. This cogito, to be sure, does not
posit an object; it remains within consciousness. But it is none-
theless homologous with the reflective cogito since it appears
as the first necessity for non-reflective consciousness to be seen
by itself. Originally then the cogito includes this nullifying
characteristic of existing for a witness, although the witness
for which consciousness exists is itself. Thus by the sole fact
that my belief is apprehended as belief, it is no longer only
belief; that is, it is already no longer belief, it is troubled
belief. Thus the ontological judgment “belief is conscious-
ness (of) belief” can under no circumstances be taken as a
statement of identity; the subject and the attribute are rad-
ically different though still within the indissoluble unity of
one and the same being.
Very well, someone will say, but at least must say that
consciousness (of) belief is consciousness (of) belief. We
rediscover identity and the in-itself on this level. It was only
a matter of choosing the appropriate plane on which we
should apprehend our object. But that is not true: to afiirm
that the consciousness (of) belief is consciousness (of) belief
is to dissociate consciousness from belief, to suppress the pa-
renthesis, and to make belief an object for consciousness; it is
to launch abruptly on to the plane of reflectivity. A conscious-
ness (of) belief which would be only consciousness (of) be-
lief W'ould in fact have to assume consciousness (of) itself as
consciousness (of) belief. Belief would become a pure tran-
scending and noematic qualification of consciousness: con-
sciousness would be free to determine itself as it pleased in
the face of that belief. It would resemble that impassive re-
gard which, according to Victor Cousin, consciousness casts
122 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
on psychic phenomena in order to elucidate them one by one.
But the analysis of methodological doubt which Husserl at-
tempted has clearly shown the fact that only rcdcctivc con-
sciousness can be dissociated from what is posited by the
consciousness reflected-on. It is on the reflective level only
that we can attempt an a putting between parenthe-
ses, only there that we can refuse what Husserl calls the mit-
machen.^ The consciousness (of) belief, while irreparably
altering belief, does not distinguish itself from belief; it exists
in order to perform the act of faith. Thus wc arc obliged to
admit that the consciousness (of) belief is belief. At its
origin we have apprehended this double game of reference:
consciousness (of) belief is belief and belief is consciousness
(of) belief. On no account can we say that consciousness is
consciousness or that belief is belief. Each of the terms refers
to the other and passes into the other, and yet each term is
different from the other. We have seen that neither belief .-nor
pleasure nor joy can exist before being conscious; conscious-
ness is the measure of their being; yet it is no less true that
belief, owing to the very fact that it can exist only as troubled,
exists from the start as escaping itself, as shattering the unity
of all the concepts in which one can wish to inclose it.
Thus consciousness (of) belief and belief are one and the
same being, the characteristic of which is absolute im-
manence. But as soon as we wish to grasp this being, it slips
between our fingers, and we find ourselves faced with a pat-
tern of duality, with a game of reflections. For consciousness
is a reflection {reflet), but qua reflection it is exactly the
one reflecting {reflechissant) , and if we attempt to grasp it as
reflecting, it vanishes and we fall back on the reflection. Tliis
Structure of- the reflection-reflecting {reflet-refletant) has
disconcerted philosophers, who have wanted to explain it by
an appeal to infinity — either by positing it as an idca-idcae
as Spinoza did, who calls it an idea-ideae-ideae, etc., or by
defining it in the manner of Hegel as a return upon itself, as
the veritable infinite. But the introduction of infinity into
consciousness, aside from the fact that it fixes the phenom-
enon and obscures it, is only an explicative theory' expressly
designed to reduce the being of consciousness to that of the
in-itself. Yet if We accept the objective existence of the re-
flection-reflecting as it is given, we are obliged to conceive
iTr. Correction for an obvious misprint.
2Tr. "To take part in,” “to participate.”
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF'THE FOR-ITSELF 123
a mode of being different from that of the in-itself , not a unity
which contains a duality, not a synthesis which surpasses and
lifts the abstract moments of the thesis and of the antithesis,
but a duality which is unity, a reflection (reflet) which is its
own reflecting (reflection). In fact if we seek to lay hold on
the total phenomenon (i.e., the unity of this duality or con-
sciousness (of) belief), we are referred immediately to one of
the terms, and this term in turn refers us to the unitary or-
ganization of immanence. But if on the contrary we wish to
take our point of departure from duality as such and to posit
consciousness and belief as a dyad, then we encounter the
idea-ideae of Spinoza and we miss the pre-reflective phenom-
enon which we wished to study. This is because pre-reflective
consciousness is self-consciousness. It is this same notion of
self which must be studied, for it defines the very being of
consciousness.-'
Let us note first that the term in-itself, which we have
borrowed from tradition to designate the transcending
being, is inaccurate. At the limit of coincidence with itself,
m fact, the self vanishes to give place to identical being. The
self can not be a property of being-in-itself. By nature it is a
reflejdve, as syntax suflaciently indicates — in particular the
logical rigor of Latin syntax with the strict distinctions im-
posed by grammar between the uses of efus and sui. The self
refers, but it refers precisely to the subject. It indicates a re-
lation between the subject and himself, and this relation is
precisely a duality, but a particular duality since it requires
particular verbal symbols. But on the other hand, the self does
not designate being either as subject or as predicate. If indeed
I consider the "se" in “i7 s’ennuie,”^ for example, I establish
that it opens up to allow the subject himself to appear behind
it. It is not the subject, since the subject without relation to
himself would be condensed into the identity of the in-itself;
neither is it a consistent articulation of the real, since it allows
the subject to appear behind it. In fact the self cannot be ap-
.nrehended as a real existent; the subject can not be self, for
coincidence with self, as we have seen, causes the seff to
disappear. But neither can it not be itself since the self is an
mdication of the subject himself. The self therefore repre-
sents an ideal distance within the immanence of the subject
Tr. Literally the “self” in “he bores himself” s’ennuie), a familiar
construction in the many French jefleiave verbs. Cf. English “he washes
hunself,”
124 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
in relation to himself, a way of not being his own coincidence,
of escaping identity while positing it as unity ^in short, of
being in a perpetually unstable equilibrium between identity
as absolute cohesion without a, trace of diversity and unity
as a synthesis of multiplicity. This is what we shall call pres-
ence to itself. The law of being of the for-itself, as the on-
tological foundation of consciousness, is, to be itself in the
form of presence to itself.
This presence to itself has often been taken for a pleni-
tude of existence, and a strong prejudice prevalent among
philosophers causes them to attribute to consciousness the
highest rank in being. But this postulate can not be main-
tained after a more thorough description of the notion of pres-
ence, Actually presence to always implies duality, at least a
virtual separation. The presence of being to itself implies a
detachment on the part of being in relation to itself. The
coincidence of identity is the veritable plenitude of being
exactly because in this coincidence there is left no place for
any negativity. Of course the principle of identity can in-
volve the principle of non-contradiction as Hegel has observed.
The being which is what it is must be able to be the being
which is not what it is not. But in the first place this negation,
like all others, comes to the surface of being through human
reality, as we have shown, and not through a dialectic appro-
priate just to being. In addition this principle can denote
only the relations of being with the external, exactly because it
presides over the relations of being with what it is not. We
are dealing then with a principle constitutive of external rela-
tions such that they can appear to a human reality present to
being-in-itself and engaged in the world. This principle does
not concern the internal relations of being; these relations,
inasnauch as they would posit an otherness, do not exist. The
principle of identity is the negation of every species of rela-
tion at the heart of being-in-itself.
Presence to self, on the contrary, supposes that an im-
palpable fissure has slipped into being If being is present to
itself, it is because it is not wholly itself. Presence is an
immediate deterioration of coincidence, for it supposes separa-
tion. But if we ask ourselves at this point what it is which
separates the subject from himself, we are forced to admit
that it is nothing. Ordinarily what separates is a distance in
space, a lapse of time, a psychological difference, or simply
the mdividuality of two .uo-presents— in short, a qualified
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 125
reality. But in the case which concerns us, nothing can sepa-
rate the consciousness (of) belief from belief, since belief is
nothing other than the consciousness (of) belief. To introduce
into the unity of a pre-reflective cogito a qualified element
external to this cogito would be to shatter its unity, to destroy
its translucency; there would then be in consciousness some-
thing of wliich it would not be conscious and which would
not exist in itself as consciousness. The separation which sep-
arates belief from itself can not be grasped or even conceived
in isolation. If we seek to reveal it, it vanishes. We find belief
once more as pure immanence. But if, on the other hand, we
wish to apprehend belief as such, then the fissure is there,
appearing when we do not wish to see it, disappearing as soon
as we seek to contemplate it. This fissure then is the pure
negative. Distance, lapse of time, psychological difference
can be apprehended in themselves and include as such ele-
ments of positivity; they have a simple negative function. But
the fissure within consciousness is a nothing except for the
fact that it denies and that it can have being only as we
do not see it.
This negative which is the nothingness of being and the
nihilating power both together, is nothingness. Nowhere else
can we grasp it in such purity. Everywhere else in one way or
another we must confer on it being-in-itself as nothingness.
But the nothingness which arises in the heart of consciousness
is not. It is made-to-be. Belief, for example, is not the con-
tiguity of one being with another being; it is its own pres-
ence to itself, its own decompression of being. Otherwise the
unity of the for-itself would dissolve into the duality of two
in-itselfs.'* Thus the for-itself must be its own nothingness.
The being of consciousness qua consciousness is to exist
at a distance from itself as a presence to itself, and this empty
distance which being carries in its being is Nothingness. Thus
in order for a self to exist, it is necessary that the unity of this
being include its own nothingness as the nihilation of iden-
tity. For the nothingness which slips into belief is its
nothingness, the nothingness of belief as belief in itself,
as belief blind and full, as “simple faith.” The for-itself is
■‘Tr. Deux en-soi. Ungrammatical as the expression “in-itselfs” admittedly
it sepms to me the most accurate translation. “In-themselves” would
have a different meaning, for it would suggest a unity of two examples
of being-in-itself, and Sartre’s point here is their duality and isolation
from each other.
126
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the being which determines itself to exist inasmuch as it can
not coincide with itself.
Hence we understand how it was that by questioning the
pre-reflective cogito without any conducting thread, we could
not find nothingness anywhere. One does not iind, one does
not disclose nothingness in the manner in which one can
find, disclose a being. Nothingness is always an elsewhere. It
is the obligation for the for-itself never to exist except in the
form of an elsewhere in relation to itself, to exist as a being
which perpetually effects in itself a break in being. This break
does not refer us elsewhere to another being; it is only a
perpetual reference of self to self, of the reflection to the
reflecting, of the reflecting to the reflection. This refer-
ence, however, does not provoke an infinite movement in
the heart of the for-itself but is given within the unity of a
single act. The infinite movement belongs only to the reflec-
tive regard which wants to apprehend the phenomenon as a
totality and which is referred from the reflection to the re-
flecting, from the reflecting to the reflection without being
able to stop. Thus nothingness is this hole in being, this fall
of the in-itself toward the self, the fall by which the for-itself
is constituted. But this nothingness can only “be made-to-be”
if its borrowed' existence is correlative with a nihilating act
on the part of being. This perpetual act by which the in-itself
degenerates into presence to itself we shall call an ontological
act. Nothingness is the putting into question of being by
being — ^that is, precisely consciousness or for-self. It is an
absolute event which comes to being by means of being and
which, without having being, is perpetually sustained by
being. Since being-in-itself is isolated in its being by its
total positivity no being can produce being and nothing can
happen to being through being — except for nothingness.
Nothingness is the peculiar possibility of being and its unique
possibility. Yet this original possibility appears only in the
absolute act which realizes it. Since nothingness is nothingness
of being, it can come to being only through being itself. Of
course it comes to being through a particular being, which is
human reality. But this being is constituted as human reality
inasmuch as this being is nothing but the original project of
its own nothingness. Human reality is being in so far as
within its being and for its being it is the unique foundation
of nothingness at the heart of being.
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 127
n. THE FACTICITY of the FOR-ITSELF
Yet the for-itself is. It is, we may say, even if it is a being
which is not what it is and which is what it is not. It is
since whatever reefs there may be to cause it to founder, still
the project of sincerity is at least conceivable. The for-itself is,
in the manner of an event, in the sense in which I can say
that Philip II has been, that my friend Pierre is or exists.
The for-itself is, in so far as it appears in a condition which
it has not chosen, as Pierre is a French bourgeois in 1942, as
Schmitt was a Berlin worker in 1870; it is in so far as it is
thrown into a world and abandoned in a “situation”; it is as
pure contingency inasmuch as for it as for things in the world,
as for this wall, this tree, this cup, the original question can
be posited: “Why is this being exactly such and not other-
wise?” It is in so far as there is in it something of which it is
^ not the foundation — its presence to the world.
Being apprehends itself as not being its own foundation,
and this apprehension is at the basis of every cogito. In this
connection it is to be noted that it reveals itself immediately
to the reflective cogito of Descartes. When Descartes wants to
profit from this revelation, he apprehends himself as an im-
perfect being “since he doubts.” But in this imperfect being,
he establishes the presence of the idea of perfection. He ap-
prehends then a cleavage between the type of being which he
can conceive and the being which he is. It is this cleavage or
lack of being which is at the origin of the second proof of
the existence of God. In fact if we get rid of the scholastic
terminology, what remains of this proof? The very clear in-
dication that the being which possesses in itself the idea of
perfection can not be its own foundation, for if it were, it
would have produced itself in conformance with that idea. In
other words, a being which would be. its own foundation could
not suffer the slightest discrepancy between what it is and
what it conceives, for it would produce itself in conformance
with its comprehension of being and could conceive only of
what it is.
But this apprehension of being as a lack of being in the
face of being is first a comprehension on the part of the cogito
of its own contingency. I think, therefore I am. What am I?
A being which is not its own foundation, which qua being,
could be other than it is to the extent that it does not account
128 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
for its being. This is that first intuition of our own contin-
gency which Heidegger gives as the first motivation for the
passage from the un-authentic to the authentic.® There is rest-
lessness, an appeal to the conscience (Ruf des Gewissens), a
feeling of guilt. In truth Heidegger’s description shows all too
clearly his anxiety to establish an ontological foundation for
an Ethics with which he claims not to be concerned, as also
to reconcile his humanism with the religious sense of the
transcendent. The intuition of our contingency is not identical
with a feeling of guilt. Nevertheless it is true that in our own
apprehension of ourselves, we appear to ourselves as having
the character of an injustifiable fact.
Earlier, however, we apprehended ourselves as conscious- ,
ness — ^that is, as a “being which exists by itself.”® How with-
in the unity of one and the same upsurge into being, can we
be that being which exists by itself as not being the foundation
of its being? Or in other words, , since the for-itself — in so far
as it is — is not its own being (i.e., is not the foundation of it) ,
how can it as for-itself, be the foundation of its own nothing-
ness? The answer is in the question.
While being is indeed the foundation of nothingness
as the nihilation of its own being, that is not the same as
saying that it is the foundation of its being. To found its own
being it would have to exist at a distance from itself, and
that would imply a certain nihilation of the being founded
as of the being which founds — a duality which would .be
unity; here we should fall back into the case of the for-itself.
In short, every effort to conceive of the idea of a being which
would be the foundation of its being results inevitably in
forming that of a being which, contingent as being-inritself,
would be the foundation of its own nothingness. The act of
causation by which God is causa sui is a nihilating act
like every recovery of the self by the self, to the same degree
that the original relation of necessity is a return to self, a re-
flexivity. This original necessity in turn appears on the foun-
dation of a contingent being, precisely that being which is
in order to be the cause of itself. Leibniz’ effort to define
necessity in terms of possibility — a definition taken up again
by Kant ^is undertaken from the point of view of knowledge
®Tr. I have corrected what must surely be a misprint. “
authentic to the authentic,” as the text actually reads, would
sense.
® Cf. Introduction, Section III.
From the
make no
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 129
and not from the point of view of being. The passage from
possibility to being such as Leibniz conceives it (the
necessary is a being whose possibility implies its existence)
marks the passage from our ignorance to knowledge. In fact
since possibility precedes existence, it can be possibility only
with respect to our thought. It is an external possibility in
relation to the being whose possibility it is, since being
unrolls from it like a consequence from a principle. But we
pointed out earlier that the notion of possibility could be con-
sidered in two aspects. We can make of it a subjective indica-
tion. The statement, “It is possible that Pierre is dead,” indi-
cates that I am in ignorance concerning Pierre’s fate, and in
this case it is a witness who decides the possible in the
presence of the world. Being has its possibility outside of it-
self in the pure regard which gauges its chances of being;
possibility can indeed be given to us before being; but it is to
us that it is given and it is in no way the possibility of this
being. The billiard ball which rolls on the table does not
possess the possibility of being turned from its path by a fold
in the cloth; neither does the possibility of deviation belong
to the cloth; it can be established only by a witness syntheti-
cally as an external relation. But possibility can also appear
to us as an ontological structure of the real. Then it belongs
to certain beings as their possibility; it is the possibility which
‘they are, which they have to be. In this case being sustains its
own possibilities in being; it is their foundation, and the
necessity of being can not then be derived from its possibility.
In a word, God, if he exists, is contingent.
Thus the being of consciousness, since this being is in
itself in order to nihilate itself in for-itself, remains contin-
gent; that is, it is not the role of consciousness either to give
being to itself or to receive it from others. In addition to the
fact that the ontological proof like the cosmological proof
fails to establish a necessary being, the explanation and the
foundation- of my being — ^in so far as I am a particular
being — can not be sought in necessary being. The premises.
Everything which is contingent must find a foundation in a
necessary being. Now I am contingent,” mark a desire to
find a foundation and do not furnish the explicative link with
a real foundation. Such premises could not in any way ac-
count for this contingency but only for the abstract idea of
contingency in general. Furthermore the question here is one
130 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
of value, not factj But v^'hile being in-itself is contingent, it
recovers itself by falling into for-itsclf. It is, in order to
lose itself in a for-itself. In a word being is and can^ only
be. But the peculiar possibility of being — that which is re-
vealed in the nihilating act — is of being the foundation of
itself as consciousness through the sacrificial act which nihi-
lates being. The for-itself is the in-itself losing itself as in-itsclf
in order to found itself as consciousness. Thus consciousness
holds within itself its own being-as-consciousness, and since
it is its own nihilation, it can refer only to itself; but that
which is annihilated^ in consciousness — though we can not call
it the foundation of consciousness — is the contingent in-itscif.
The in-itself can not provide the foundation for anything; if it
founds itself, it does so by giving itself the modification
of the for-itself. It is the foundation of itself in so far as it is
already no longer in-itself, and we encounter here again the
origin of every foundation. If being in-itself can be neither its
own foundation nor that of other beings, the whole idea of
foundation- comes into the world through the for-itself. It is
not only that the for-itself as a nihilated in-itself is itself given
a foundation, but with it foundation appears for the first time.
It follows that this in-itself, engulfed and nihilated in the
absolute event which is the appearance of the foundation or
upsurge of the for-itself, remains at the heart of the for-itself
as its original contingency. Consciousness is its own founda-
tion but it remains contingent in order that there may be a
consciousness rather than an infinity of pure and simple in-
itself. The absolute event or for-itself is contingent in its
very being. If I decipher the givens of the pre-reflective
cogito, I establish, to be sure, that the for-itself 'refers to
itself. Whatever the for-itself may be, it is this in the mode
of consciousness of being. Thirst refers to the consciousness
of thirst, which it is, as to its foundation — and conversely.
But the totality “reflected-reflecting,” if it could be given,
would be contingency and in-itself. But this totality can not
be attained, since I can not say either that the consciousness
of thirst is consciousness of thirst, or that thirst is thirst. It
is there as a nihilated totality, as the evanescent unity of the
phenomenon. If I apprehend the phenomenon as plurality,
this plurality indicates itself as a total unity, and hence its
reasoning indeed is explicitly based on the exigencies of reason.
«• “annihilated” here.^but I feel that he must have meant
nihilated since he has told us earher that being can not be annihilated.
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 131
meaning is its contingency. That is, I can ask myself, “Why
am I thirsty? Why am I conscious of this glass? Of this.
Me?” But as soon as I consider this totality in in^self, it
nihilates itself under my regard. It is not; it is in order not
to be, and I return to the f or-itself apprehended in its sugges-
tion of duality as the foundation of itself. I am angry because
I produce myself as consciousness of anger. Suppress this
self-causation which constitutes the being of the for-itself, and
you will no longer find anything, not even “anger-in-itself”;
for anger exists by nature as for-itself. Thus the for-itself is
sustained by a perpetual contingency for which it assumes
the responsibility and which it assimilates without ever being
able to suppress it. This perpetually evanescent contingency
of the in-itself which, without ever allowing itself to be appre-
hended, haunts the for-itself and reattaches it to being-in-itself
— this contingency is what we shall call the facticity
of the for-itself. It is this facticity which permits us to say
that the for-itself is, that it exists, although we can never
realize the facticity, and although we always apprehend it
through the for-itself.
We indicated earlier that we can be nothing without play-
ing at being.® “If I am a cafe waiter,” we said, “this can be
only in the mode of not being one.” And that is true. If I
could be a cafe waiter, I should suddenly constitute myself as
a contingent block of identity. And that I am not. This con-
tingent being in-itself always escapes me. But in order that
I may freely give a meaning to the obligations which my
state involves, then in one sense at the heart of the for-itself,
as a perpetually evanescent totality, being-in-itself must be
given as the evanescent contingency of my situation. This is
the result of the fact that while I must play at being a cafe
waiter in order to be one, stUl it would be in vain for me to
play at being a diplomat or a sailor, for I would not be one.
Ihis inapprehensible fact of my condition, this impalpable
difference which distinguishes this drama of realization from
drama pure and simple is what causes the for-itself, while
choosing the meaning of its situation arid while constituting'
Uself as the foundation of itself in situation, not to choose
Its position. This part of my condition is what causes me to
^pprehend myself simultaneously as totally responsible for my
oemg-— inasmuch as I am its foundation — and yet as totally
unjustifiable. Without facticity consciousness could choose its
* Part One, Chapter Two, Section II. ~
132 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
attachments to the world in the same way as the souls in Plato’s
Republic choose their condition. I could determine myself
to “be born a worker” or to “be born a bourgeois.” But on
the other hand facticity can not constitute me as being a
bourgeois or being a worker. It is not even strictly speaking
a resistance of fact since it is only by recovering it in the sub-
structure of the pre-refiective cogito that I confer on it its
meaning and its resistance. Facticity is only one indication
which I give myself of the being to which I must reunite
myself in order to be what I am.
It is impossible to grasp facticity in its brute nudity, since
all that we will find of it is already recovered and freely
constructed. The simple fact “of being there,” at that table,
in that chair is already the pure object of a limiting-concept
and as such can not be grasped. Yet it is contained in my
“consciousness of being-there,” as its full contingency, as the
nihilated in-itself on the basis of which the for-itself produces
itself as consciousness of being there. The for-itself looking
deep into itself as the consciousness of being there will never
discover anything in itself but motivations; that is, it will be
perpetually referred to itself and to its constant freedom. (I
am there in order to . . . etc.) But the contingency which
paralyzes these motivations to the same degree as they totally
found themselves is the facticity of the for-itself. The relation
of the for-itself, which is its own foundation qua for-itself,
to facticity can be correctly termed a factual necessity. It is
indeed this factual necessity which Descartes and Husserl
seized upon as constituting the evidence of the cogito.
The for-itself is necessary in so far as it provides its own
foundation. And this is why it is the object reflected by an
apodictic intuition. I can not doubt that I am. But in so far
as this for-itself as such could also not be, it has all the con-
tingency of fact. Just as my nihilating freedom is apprehended
in anguish, so the for-itself is conscious of its facticity. It has
the feeling of its complete gratuity; it apprehends itself as
being there for nothing, as being de trop.
We must not confuse facticity with that Cartesian substance
whose attribute ^ is thought. To be sure, thinking substance
existe only as it thinks; and since it is a created thing, it
participates in the contingency of the ens creatum. But it is.
t preserves the character of being-in-itself in its integrity,
t ough Ae for-itself is its attribute. This is what is called
Descartes substantialist illusion. For us, on the other
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 133
hand, the appearance of the for-itself or absolute event refers
indeed to the effort of an in-itself to found itself; it cor-
responds to an attempt on the part of being to remove con-
tingency from its being. But this attempt results in the nihha-
tion of the in-itself, because the in-itself can not found itself
without introducing the self or a reflective, nihilating refer-
ence into the absolute identity of its being and consequently
degenerating into for-itself. The for-itself corresponds then to
an expanding de-structuring of the in-itself, and the in-itself
is nihilated and absorbed in its attempt to found itself. Fac-
ticity is not then a substance of which the for-itself would be
the attribute and which would produce thought without ex-
hausting itself in that very production. It simply resides in
the for-itself as a memory of being, as its unjustifiable pres-
ence in the world. Being-in-itself can found its nothingness
but not its being. In its decompression it nihUates itself in a
for-itself which becomes qua for-itself its own foundation;
but the contingency which the for-itself has derived from the
in-itself remains out of reach. It' is what remains of the in-it-
self in the for-itself as facticity and what causes the for-itself
to have only a factual necessity; that is, it is the foundation
of its consciousness-of -being or existence, but on no account
can it found its presence. Thus consciousness can in no case
prevent itself from being and yet it is totally responsible for its
being.
m. THE FOR-ITSELF AND THE BEING
OF VALUE
Any study of human reality must begin with the cogito. But
the Cartesian “I think” is conceived in the instantaneous per-
spective of temporality. Can we find in the heart of the cogi-
to a way of transcending this instantaneity? If human reality
Were limited to the being of the “I think,” it would have
^y the truth of an instant. And it is indeed true that with
Descartes -the cogito is an instantaneous totality, since by
Itself it makes no claim on the future and since an act of
continuous “creation” is necessary to make it pass from one
instant to another. But can we even conceive of the truth of
nn instant? Does the cogito not in its own way engage both
future? Heidegger is so persuaded that the “I think”
0 Husserl is a trap for larks, fascinating and ensnaring,
134 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
that he has completely avoided any appeal to consciousness in
his description of Dasein, His goal is to show it immediately
as care; that is, as escaping itself in the projecting of self to-
ward the possibilities which it is. It is this project of the self
outside the self which he calls “understanding” (Verstand)
and which permits him to establish human reality as being a
“revealing-revealed.” But this attempt to show first the
escape from self of the Dasein is going to encounter in turn
insurmountable difficulties; we cannot first suppress the di-
mension “consciousness,” not even if it is in order to re-estab-
lish it subsequently. Understanding has meaning only if it is
consciousness of understanding. My possibility can exist as my
possibility only if it is my consciousness which escapes itself
toward my possibility. Otherwise the whole system of being
and its possibilities will fall into the unconscious — that is into
the in-itself. Behold, we are thrown back again toward the
cogito. We must make this our point of departure. Can we
extend it without losing the benefits of reflective evidence?
What has the description of the for-itself revealed to us?
First we have encountered a nihilation in which the being
of the for-itself is affected in its being. This revelation of
nothingness did not seem to us to pass beyond the limits of
the cogito. But let us consider more closely.
The for-itself can not sustain nihilation without deter-
mining itself as a lack of being. This means that the nihila-
tion does not coincide with a simple introduction of emptiness
into consciousness. An external being has not expelled the
in-itself from consciousness; rather the for-itself is perpetually
determining itself not to be the in-itself. This means that it can
establish itself only in terms of the in-itself and against the
in-itself. Thus since the nihilation is the nihilation of being,
it represents the original connection between the being of the
for-itself and the being of the in-itself. The concrete, real in-
itself is wholly present to the heart of consciousness as that
which consciousness determines itself not to be. The cogito
must necessarily lead us to discover this total, out-of-reach
presence of the in-itself. Of course the fact of this presence
vrill be the very transcendence of the for-itself. But it is pre-
cisely^ the nihilation which is the origin of transcendence
conceived as the original bond between the for-itself and the
in-itself. Thus we catch a glimpse of a way of getting out of
&e cogito. We shall see later indeed that the profound mean-
ing of the cogito is essentially to refer outside itself. But it is
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 135
not yet time to describe this characteristic of the for-itself.
What our ontological description has immediately revealed
is that this being is the foundation of itself as a lack of being;
that is, that it determines its being by means of a being
which it is not.
Nevertheless there are many ways of not being and some
of them do not touch the inner nature of the being which is
not what it is not. If, for example, I say of an inkwell that it
is not a bird, the inkwell and the bird remain untouched by
the negation. This is an external relation which can be estab-
lished only by a human reality acting as witness. By contrast,
there is a type of negation which establishes an internal rela-
tion between what one denies and that concerning which the
denial is made.^°
Of all internal negations, the one which penetrates most
deeply into being, the one which constitutes in its being the
being concerning which it makes the denial along with the
being which it denies — this negation is lack. This lack does
not belong to the nature of the in-itself, which is aU positivity.
It appears in the world only with the upsurge of human
reality. It is only in the human world that there can be lacks.
A lack presupposes a trinity: that which is missing or “the
lacking,” that which misses what is lacking or “the existing,”
and a totality which has been broken by the lacking and
which would be restored by the synthesis of “the lacking”
and “the existing” — this is “the lacked.”^^ The being which
is released to the intuition of human reality is always that to
which some thing is lacking — i.e., the existing. For example,
if I say that the moon is not full and that one quarter is
lacking, I base this judgment on full intuition of the crescent
moon. Thus what is released to intuition is an in-itself which
by itself is neither complete nor incomplete but which simply
is what it is, without relation with other beings. In order for
this in-itself to be grasped as the crescent moon, it is neces-
sary that a human reality surpass the given toward the proj-
ect of the realized totality — ^here the disc of the full moon —
Hegelian opposition belongs to this type of negation. But this opposi-
on must itself be based on an original internal negation; that is, on
For example, if the non-essential becomes in its turn the essential,
^ is because it is experienced as a lack in the heart of the essential
“th 1 “the lacking,” I'exlstant, “the existing": le manqui.
e lacked." Le manque is “the lack.” At times when manqu6 is used as
^ jective, I have translated it as *‘mi5sing/’ e.g., Ten-soi manqui, ‘‘the
mussing in-itself.”
136
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
and return toward the given to constitute it as the crescent
moon; that is, in order to realize it in its being in terms of
the totality which becomes its foundation. In this same sur-
passing the lacking will be posited as that whose synthetic
addition to the existing will reconstitute the synthetic totality
of the lacked. In this sense the lacking is of the same na-
ture as the existing; it would suffice to reverse the situation
in order for it to become the existing to which the lacking
is mis sing, while the existing would become the lacking.
This lacking as the complement of the existing is determined
in its being by the synthetic totality of the lacked. Thus in the
human world, the incomplete being which is released to intui-
tion as lacking is constituted in its being by the lacked —
that is, by what it is not. It is the full moon which confers on
the crescent moon its being as crescent; what-is-not determines
what-is. It is in the being of the existing, as the correlate of a
human transcendence, to lead outside itself to the being
which it is not — as to its meaning.
Human reality by which lack appears in the world must
be itself a lack. For lack can come into being only through
lack; the in-itself can not be the occasion of lack in- the
in-itself. In other words, in order for being to be lacking or
lacked, it is necessary that a being make itself its own lack;
only a being which lacks can surpass being toward the lacked. _
The existence of desire as a human fact is sufficient to
prove that human reality is a lack. In fact how can we ex-
plain desire if we insist on viewing it as a psychic state; that
is, as a being whose nature is to be what it is? A being which
is what it is, to the degree that it is considered as being what
it is, summons nothing to itself in order to complete itself.
An incomplete circle does not call for completion unless it is
surpassed by- human transcendence. In itself it is complete
and perfectly positive as an open curve. A psychic state which
existed^ with the sufficiency of this curve could not possess
in addition the slightest “appeal to” something else; it would
be itself without any relation to what is not it. In order to
constitute it as hunger or thirst, an external transcendence
surpassing it toward the totality “satisfied hunger” would be
necessary, just as the crescent moon is surpassed toward the
full moon.
We will not get out of the difficulty by making desire a
conatus conceived in the manner of a physical force For the
conatus once again, even if we grant it the efficiency of a
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 137
cause, can not possess in itself the character of a reaching out
toward another state. The conatus as the producer of states
can not be identified with desire as the appeal from a state.
Neither will recourse to psycho-physiological parallelism en-
able us better to clear away the dfficulties. Thirst as an organic
phenomenon, as a “physiological” need of water, does not
exist. An organism deprived of water presents certain positive
phenomena: for example, a certain coagulatmg thickening of
the blood, which provokes in turn certain other phenomena.
The ensemble is a positive state of the organism which refers
only to itself, exactly as the thickening of a solution from
which the water has evaporated can not be considered by itself
as the solution’s desire of water. If we suppose an exact corre-
spondence between the mental and the physiological, this
correspondence can be established only on the basis of on-
tological identity, as Spinoza has seen. Consequently the being
of psychic thirst will be the being in itself of a state, and we
are referred once again to a transcendent witness. But then
the thirst will be desire for this transcendence but not for it-
self; it will be desire in the eyes of another. If desire is to be -
able to be desire to itself it must necessarily be itself tran-
scendence; that is, it must by nature be an escape from itself
toward the desired object. In other words, it must be a lack —
but not an object-lack, a lack undergone, created by the
surpassing which it is not; it must be its own lack of .
Desire is a lack of being. It is haunted in its inmost being by
the being of which it is desire. Thus it bears witness to the ex-
istence of lack in the being of human reality. But if human
reality is lack, then it is through human reality that the trinity
of the existing, the lacking and the lacked comes into being.
What exactly are the three terms of this trinity?
That which plays here the role of the existing is what is
released to the cogito as the immediate of the desire; for ex-
ample, it is this for-itself which we have apprehended as not
bemg what it is and being what it is not. But how are we to
define the lacked?
To answer this question, we must return to the idea of lack
and determine more exactly the bond which unites the exist-
ing to the lacking. This bond can not be one of simple con-
iguity. K what is lacking is in its very absence still, pro-
oundly present at the heart of the existing, it is because the
isting and the lacking are at the same moment apprehended
surpassed in the unity of a single totality. And that which
138 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
constitutes itself as lack can do so only by surpassing itself
toward one great broken form. Thus lack is appearance on
the ground of a totality. Moreover it matters little whether tWs
totality has been originally given and is now broken (e.g.,
“The arms of the Venus di Milo are now lacking”) or wheth-
er it has never yet been realized (e.g., “He lacks courage”).
What is important is only that the lacking and the existing are
given or are apprehended as about to be annihilated in the
unity of the totality which is lacked. Everything which is lack-
ing is Tan king to for — : What is given in the unity
of a primitive upsurge is the for, conceived as not yet being
or as not being any longer, an absence toward which the cur-
tailed existing surpasses itself or is surpassed and thereby con-
stitutes itself as curtailed. What is the for of human reality?
The for-itself, as the foundation of itself, is the upsurge of
the negation. The for-itself founds itself in so far as it denies
in relation to itself a certain being or a mode of being. What
it denies or nihilates, as we know, is being-in-itself. But no
matter what being-in-itself: human reality is before all else
its own nothingness. What it denies or nihilates in relation to
itself as for-itself can be only itself. The meaning of human
reality as nihilated is constituted by this nihilation and this
presence in it of what it nihilates; hence the self-as-being-in-
itself is what human reality lacks and what makes its mean-
ing. Since human reality in its primitive relation to itself is
not what it is, its relation to itself is not primitive and can
derive its meaning only from an original relation which is the
null relation or identity. It is the self which would be what it
is which allows the for-itself to be apprehended as not being
what it is; the relation denied in the definition of the for-itself
— ^which as such should be first posited — is a relation (given
as perpetually absent) between the for-itself and itself in the
mode of identity. The meaning of the subtle confusion by
wMch thirst escapes and is not thirst (in so far as it' is con-
sciousness of thirst) is a thirst which would be thirst and
which haunts it. What the for-itself lacks is the self — or itself
as in-itself .
. Nevertheless we must not confuse this missing in-itself
(the lacked) with that of facticity. The in-itself of facticity
in its failure to found itself is reabsorbed in pure presence in
the world on the p^ of the for-itself. The missing in-itself,
on the other hand, is pure absence. Moreover the failure of
e act to found the in-itself has caused the for-itself to rise
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 139
up from the in-itself as the foundation of its own nothingness..
But the meaning of the missing act of founding remains as
transcendent. The for-itself in its being is failure because it is
the foundation only of itself as nothingness. In truth this
failure is its very being, but it has meaning only if- the for-
itself apprehends itself as failure in the presence of the being
which it has failed to be; that is, of the being which would
be the foundation of its being and no longer merely the
foundation of its nothingness — or, to put it another way,
which would be its foundation as coincidence with itself.
By nature the cogito refers to the lacking and to the lacked,
for the cogito is haunted by being, as Descartes well realized.
Such is the origin of transcendence. Human reality is its
own surpassing toward what it lacks; it surpasses itself toward
the particular being which it would be if it were what it is.
Human reality is not something which exists first in order
afterwards to lack this or that; it exists first as lack and in
immediate, synthetic connection with what it lacks. Thus the
pure event by which human reality rises as a presence in the
world is apprehended by itself as its own lack. In its coming
into existence human reality grasps itself as an incomplete
being. It apprehends itself as being in so far as it is not, in
the presence of the particular totality which it lacks and
which it is in the form of not being it and which is what it
is. Human reality is a perpetual surpassing toward a coin-
cidence with itself which is never given. If the cogito reaches
toward being, it is because by its very thrust it surpasses
itself toward being by qualifying itself in its being as the
being to which coincidence with self is lacking in order for
it to be what it is. The cogito is indissolubly linked to
being-in-itself, not as a thought to its object — ^which would
make the in-itself relative — ^but as a lack to that which
defines its lack. In this sense the second Cartesian proof is
rigorous. Imperfect being surpasses itself toward perfect
being; the being which is the foundation only of its nothing-
ness surpasses itself toward the being which is the foundation
of its being. But the being toward which human reality sur-
passes itself is not a transcendent God; it is at the heart of
r®nhty; it is only human reality itself as totality.
. totality is not the pure and simple contingent in-
1 self of the transcendent. If what consciousness apprehends
T toward which it surpasses itself were the pure in-
^ olf, it would coincide with the annihilation of consciousness.
140 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
But consciousness does not surpass itself toward its annihila-
tion; it does not want to lose itself in the in-itself of identity
at the limit of its surpassing. It is for the for-itself as such
that the for-itself lays claim to being-in-itself .
Thus this perpetually absent being which haunts the for-
itself is itself fixed in the in-itself. It is the impossible syn-
thesis of the for-itself and the in-itself; it would be its own
foundation not as nothingness but as being and would pre-
serve within it the necessary translucency of consciousness
along with the coincidence with itself of being-in-itself. It
would preserve in it that turning back upon the self which
conditions every necessity and every foundation. But this re-
turn to the self would be without distance; it would not be
presence to itself, but identity with itself. In short, this
being would be exactly the self which we have shown can
exist only as a perpetually evanescent relation, but it would be
this self as substantial being. Thus human reality arises as such
in the presence of its own totality or self as a lack of that
totality. And this totality can not be given by nature,
since it combines in itself the incompatible characteristics of
the in-itself and the for-itself.
Let no one reproach us with capriciously inventing a being
of this kind; when by a further movement of thought the
being and absolute absence of this totality are hypostasized as
transcendence beyond the world, it takes on the name of God.
Is not God a being who is what he is — in that he is all positiv-
ity and the foundation of the world — and at the same time
a being who is not what he is and who is what he is not — in
that he is self-consciousness and the necessary foundation of ■
himself? The being of human reality is suffering because it
rises in being as perpetually haunted by a totality which it is
without bemg able to be it, prewsely because it could not
attain the in-itself without losing itself as for-itself. Human
reality Aerefore is by nature an unhappy consciousness with
no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state.
But what exactly is the nature of this being toward which
unhappy consciousness surpasses itself? Shall we say that it
does not exist? Those contradictions which we discovered
in it prove only that it can not be realized. Nothing can
hold out against this self-evident truth: consciousness cani
exist only as engaged in this being which surrounds it
on all sides and which paralyzes it with its phantom pres-
ence. Shall we say that it is a being relative to consciousness?
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 141
This would be to confuse it with the object of a thesis. This
being is not posited through and before consciousness; there
is no consciousness of this being since it haunts non-thetic
self-consciousness. It points to consciousness as the meaning
of its being and yet consciousness is no more conscious of it
than of itself. StUl it can not escape from consciousness; but
inasmuch as consciousness enjoys being a consciousness (of)
being, this being is there. Consciousness does not confer
meaning on this being as it does for this inkwell or this pen-
cil; but without this being, which it is in the form of not
being it, consciousness would not be consciousness — i.e., lack.
On the contrary, consciousness derives for itself its meaning as
consciousness from this being. This being comes into the
world along with consciousness, at once in its heart and out-
side it; it is absolute transcendence in absolute immanence.
It has no priority over consciousness, and consciousness
has no priority over it. They form a dyad. Of course this
being could not exist without the for-itself, but neither
could the for-itself exist without it. Consciousness in relation
to this being stands in the mode of being this being, for this
bemg is consciousness, but as a being which consciousness
can not be. It is consciousness itself, in the heart of con-
sciousness, and yet out of reach, as an absence, an unrealiz-
able. Its nature is to enclose its own contradiction within it-
self; its relation to the for-itself is a total immanence which
is achieved in total transcendence.
Furthermore this being need not be conceived as present
to consciousness with only the abstract characteristics which
our study has established. The concrete consciousness arises in
situation, and it is a unique, individualized consciousness of
this situation and (of) itself in situation. It is to this concrete
consciousness that the self, is present, and all the concrete
characteristics of consciousness have their correlates in the
totality of the self. The self is individual; it is the individual
completion of the self which haunts the for-itself.
A feeling, for example, is a feeling in the presence of a
norm; that is, a feeling of the same type but one which
would be what it is. This norm or totality of the affective
self is directly present as a lack suffered in the very heart
pi suffering. One suffers and one suffers from not suffer-
ing enough. The suffering of which we speak is never ex-
actly that which we feel. What we call “noble” or “good” or
true” suffering and what moves us is the suffering which we
142 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
read on the faces of others, better yet in portraits, in the face
of a statue, in a tragic mask. It is a suffering which has being.
It is presented to us as a compact, objective whole which did
not await our coming in order to be and which overflows the
consciousness which we have of it; it is there in the midst
of the world, impenetrable and dense, like this tree or this
stone; it endures; finally it is what it is. We can speak of it —
that suffering there which is expressed by that set of the
mouth, by that frown. It is supported and expressed by the
physiognomy but not created by it. Suffering is posited upon
the physiognomy; it is beyond passivity as beyond activity,
beyond negation as beyond affirmation — it is. However it can
be only a consciousness of self. We know well that this mask
does not express the unconscious grimace of a sleeper or the
rictus of a dead man. It refers to possibilities, to a situation
in the world. The suffering is the conscious relation to these
possibilities, to this situation, but it is solidified, cast in . the
bronze of being. And it is as such that it fascinates us; it
stands as a degraded approximation of that suffering-in-itself
which haunts our own suffering. The suffering which I ex-
perience, on the contrary, is never adequate suffering, due
to the fact that it nihilates itself as in-itself by the very act
by which it founds itself. It escapes as suffering toward the
consciousness of suffering. I can never be surprised by it,
for it is only to the exact degree that I experience it. Its trans-
lucency removes from it all depth. I can not observe it as I
observe the suffering of the statue, since I make my own
suffering and since I know it. If I must suffer, I should
prefer that my suffering would seize me and flow over me like
a storm, but instead I must raise it into existence in my free
spontaneity. I should like simultaneously to be it and to con-
quer it, but this enormous, opaque suffering, which should
transport me out of myself, continues instead to touch me
lightly with its wing, and I can not grasp it. I find only
myself, myself who moans, myself who wails, myself who in
order to realize this suffering which I am must play without
respite the drama of suffering. I wring my hands, I cry in
order that being-in-itselfs, their sounds, their gestures may
run through the world, ridden by the suffering-in-itself which
I can not be. Each groan, each facial expression of the man
w o suffers aims at sculpturing a statue-in-itself of suffer-
ing. But this statue will never exist save through others and
or others. My suffering suffers from being what it is not
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 143
and from not being what it is. At the point of being made
one with itself, it escapes, separated from itself by nothing,
by that nothingness of which it is itself the foundation. It is
loquacious because it is not adequate, but its ideal is silence —
the silence of the statue, of the beaten man who lowers his
head and veils his face without speaking. But with this man
too — it is for me that he does not speak. In himself he chat-
ters incessantly, for the words of the inner language are like
the outlines of the “self” of suffering. It is for my eyes that
he is “crushed” by suffering; in himself he feels himself
responsible for that grief which he wills even while not wish-
ing it and which he does not wish even while willing it, that
grief which is haunted by a perpetual absence — ^the absence of
the motionless, mute suffering which is the self, the concrete,
out-of-reach totality of the for-itself which suffers, the for
of Human-Reality in suffering. We can see that my suffering
never posits this suffering-in-itself which visits it. My real
suffering is not an effort to reach to the self. But it can be
suffering only as consciousness (of) not being enough suffer-
ing in the presence of that full and absent suffering.
Now we can ascertain more exactly what is the being of
the self; it is value. Value is affected with the double charac-
ter, which moralists have very inadequately explained, of
both being unconditionally and not being. Qua value indeed,
value has being, but this normative existent does not have to
be precisely , as reality. Its being is to be value; that is, not-to-
be being. Thus the being of value qua value is the being of
what does not have being. Value then appears inapprehensi-
ble. To take it as being is to risk totally misunderstanding its
unreality and to make of it, as sociologists do, a requirement
of fact among other facts. In this case the contingency of
being destroys value. But conversely if one looks only at the
ideality of values, one is going to extract being from them,
and then for lack of being, they dissolve. Of course, as Scheler
has shown, I can achieve an intuition of values in terms of
concrete exemplifications; I can grasp nobility in a noble act
But value thus apprehended is not given as existing on the
same level of being as the act on which it confers value — ^in
the way, for example, that the essence “red” is in relation to a
particular red. Value is given as a beyond of the acts con-
rpnted, as the limit, for example, of die infinite progression
u noble acts. Value is beyond being. Yet if we are not to be
144 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
taken in by fine words, we must recognize that this being
which is beyond being possesses being in some way at least.
These considerations suffice to make us admit that human
reality is that by which value arrives in the world. But the
meaning of being for value is that it is that toward which a
being surpasses its being; every value-oriented act is a wrench-
ing away from its own being toward . Since value is al-
ways and everywhere the beyond of all surpassings, it can be
considered as the unconditioned unity of all surpassings of be-
ing. Thereby it makes a dyad with the reality which originally
surpasses its being and by which surpassing comes into being
— i.e., with human reality. We see also that since value is the
unconditioned beyond of all surpassings, it must be originally
the beyond of the very being which surpasses, for that is
the only way in which value can be the original beyond of
all possible surpassings. If every surpassing must be able to
be surpassed, it is necessary that the being which surpasses
should be a priori surpassed in so far as it is the very source
of surpassings. Thus value taken in its origin, or the supreme
value, is the beyond and the for of transcendence. It is the
beyond which surpasses and which provides the foundation
for all my surpassings but toward which I can never surpass
myself, precisely because my surpassings presuppose it.
In all cases of lack value is “the lacked”: it is not “the
lacking.” Value is the self in so far as the self haunts the heart
of the for-itself as that for which the for-itself is. The
supreme value toward which consciousness at every instant
surpasses itself by its ve^ being is the absolute being of the
self with its characteristics of identity, of purity, of perma-
nence, etc,, and as its own foundation. This is what enables us
to conceive why value can simultaneously be and not be. It is
as the meaning and the beyond of all surpassing; it is as the
absent in-itself which haunts being-for-itself. But as soon as
we consider value, we see that it is itself a surpassing of this
being-in-itself, since value gives being to itself. It is beyond
its own being since with the type of being of coincidence
with self, it immediately surpasses this being, its permanence.
Its purity, its consistency, its identity, its silence, by reclaiming
these qualities by virtue of presence to itself. And conversely
It we start by considering it as presence to itself, this pres-
ence immediately is solidified, fixed in the in-itself. More-
over It IS m Its being the missing totality toward which a being
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 14S
makes itself be. It arises for a being, not as this being is what
it is in full contingency, but as it is the foundation of its own
nihilation. In this sense value haunts being as being founds
itself but not as being is. Value haunts freedom. This means
that the relation of value to the for-itself is very particular:
it is the being which has to be in so far as it is the foundation
of its nothingness of being. Yet while it has to be this being,
this is not because it is under the pressure of an external con-
straint, nor because value, like the Unmoved Mover of Aris-
totle, exercises over it an attraction of fact, nor is it because its
being has been received; but it is because in its being it
makes itself be as having to be this being. In a word the
self, the for-itself, and their inter-relation stand within
the limits of an unconditioned freedom — in the sense that
nothing makes value exist — ^unless it is that freedom which
by the same stroke makes me myself exist — and also within
the limits of concrete facticity — since as the foundation of
its nothingness, the for-itself can not be the foundation of its
being. There is then a total contingency of being-for-value
(which will come up again in connection with morality to
paralyze and relativize it) and at the same time a free and
absolute necessity.^^
Value in its original upsurge is not posited by the for-itself;
it is consubstantial with it — ^to such a degree that there is no
consciousness which is not haunted by its value and that hu-
man-reality in the broad sense includes both the for-itself
and value. If value haunts the for-itself without being posited
by it, this is because value is not the object of a thesis;
otherwise the for-itself would have to be a positional object
“ One will perhaps be tempted to translate the trinity under consideration
into Hegelian terms and to make of the in-itself the thesis, of the for-itself
the antithesis, and of the in-itself-for-itself or value the synthesis. But it
must be noted here that while the For-itself lacks the In-itself, the In-itself
does not lack the For-itself. There is then no reciprocity in the opposition.
a word, the For-itself remains non-essential and contingent in relation to
1 e ^ In-itself, and it is this non-essentiality which we earlier called its
acticity. In addition, the synthesis or value would indeed be a return to
e thesis, then a return upon itself; but as this is an unrealizable totality,
® For-itself is not a moment which can be surpassed As such its nature
^proachfes much nearer to the “ambiguous” realities of Kierkegaard. Fur-
. we find here a double play of unilateral oppositions: the For-itself
M ®^^se lacks the In-itself, which does not lack the For-itself; but in
^ sense the In-itself lacks its own possibility (or the lacking For-
® Ji which in this case does not lack the In-itself.
146 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
to itself since value and the for-itself can arise only in the
consubstantial unity of a dyad. Thus the for-itself as a non-
thetic self-consciousness does not exist in the face of value in
the sense that for Leibniz the monad exists “alone in the face
of God.” Value therefore is not known at this stage since
knovi^ledge posits the object in the face of consciousness.
Value is merely given with the non-thetic transluccncy of the
for-itself, which makes itself be as the consciousness of being.
Value is everywhere and nowhere; at the heart of the nihilat-
ing relation “reflection-reflecting,” it is present and out of
reach, and it is simply lived as the concrete meaning of that
lack which makes my present being. In order for value to
become the object of a thesis, the for-itself which it haunts
must also appear before the regard of reflection. Reflective
consciousness in fact accomplishes two things by the same
stroke; the Erlebnis reflected-on is posited in its nature as
lack, and value is disengaged as the out-of-rcach meaning of
what is lacked. Thus reflective consciousness can be properly
called a moral consciousness since it can not arise without
at the same moment disclosing values. It is obvious that I
remain free in my reflective consciousness to direct my at-
tention on these values or to neglect them — exactly as it
depends on me to look more closely at this table, my pen, or
my package of tobacco. But whether they are the object of
a detailed attention or not, in any case they are.
It is not necessary to conclude, however, that the reflective
regard is the only one which can make value appear, nor
should we by analogy project the values of our for-itself into
the world of transcendence. If the object of intuition is a
phenomenon of human reality but transcendent, it is re-
leased immediately with its value, for the for-itself of the
Other is not a hidden phenomenon which would be given only
as the conclusion of a reasoning by analogy. It manifests it-
self originally to my for-itself; as we shall see, the presence of
the for-itself as for-others is even the necessary condition for
the constitution of the for-itself as such. In this upsurge of
the for-others, value is given as in the upsurge of the for-itself,
a though in a different mode of being. But we can not treat
here the objective encounter with values in the world since
we have not elucidated the nature of the for-others. We shall
return to the examination of this question in the third part
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 147
IV. THE FOR-ITSELF AND THE BEING
OF POSSIBILITIES
We have seen that human reality as for-itself is a lack and
that what it lacks is a certain coincidence with itself. Con-
cretely, each particular for-itself {Erlebnis) lacks a certain
particular and concrete reality, which if the for-itself were
synthetically assimilated with it, would transform the for-itself
into itself. It lacks something for something else — as the
broken disc of the moon lacks that which would be necessary
to complete it and transform it into a full moon. Thus the
lacking arises in the process of transcendence and is deter-
mined by a return toward the existing in terms of the
lacked. The lacking thus defined is transcendent and comple-
mentary in relation to the existing. They are then of the same
nature. What the crescent moon lacks in order to be a full
moon is precisely a fragment of moon; what the obtuse angle
ABC lacks in order to make two right angles is the acute angle
CBD. What the for-itself lacks in order to be made a whole
with itself is the for-itself. But we are by no means dealing
with a strange for-itself; that is, with a for-itself which I am
not. In fact since the risen ideal is the coincidence with self,
the lacking for-itself is a for-itself which I am. But on the
other hand, if I were it in the mode of identity, the ensemble
would become an in-itself. I am the lacking for-itself in the
mode of having to be the for-iteelf which I am not, in order to
identify myself with it in the unity of the self. Thus the
original transcendent relation of the for-itself to the self
perpetually outlines a project of identification of the for-itself
with an absent for-itself which it is and which it lacks. What
IS given as the peculiar lack of each for-itself and what is
strictly^ defined as lacking to precisely this for-itself and no
other is the possibility of the for-itself. The possible rises
on the ground of the nihilation of the for-itself. It is not con-
ceived thematically afterwards as a means of reuniting the
^5^her the upsurge of the for-itself as the nihilation of
he in-itself and the decompression of being causes possibility
0 arhe as one of the aspects of this decompression of being;
at IS, as a way of being what one is — at a distance from
c self. Thus the for-itself can not appear without being
aunted by value and projected toward its own possibles. Yet
as soon as it refers us to its possibles, the cogito drives us
148 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
outside the instant toward that which it is in the mode of
not being it.
In order to understand better how human reality both is
and is not its own possibilities, we must return to the notion
of the possible and attempt to elucidate it.
With the possible as with value there is the greatest diffi-
culty in understanding its being, for it is given as prior to the
being of which it is the pure possibility; and yet qua possible,
at least, it necessarily must have being. Do we not say, “It is
possible that he may come.” Since Leibniz the term “possible”
is usually applied to an event which is not engaged in ’an
existing causal series such that the event can be surely de-
termined and which involves no contradiction either with it-
self or with the system under consideration. Thus defined the
possible is possible only with regard to knowledge since we are
not in a position either to affirm or to deny the possible con-
fronted.
Hence we may take two attitudes in the face of the possi-
le. We can consider, as Spinoza did, that possibilities exist
only m connection with our ignorance and that they disappear
when our ignorance disappears. In this case the possible is
only a subjective stage on the road to perfect knowledge; it
♦ ^1 ^ psychic mode; as confused or cur-
tailed thought It has a concrete being but not as a property of
the world But it is also permissible, as Leibniz does, to make
of possibles objects _of thought for the divine
confer on them a mode of absolute real-
ty; ffiis position reserves for the divine will the power to real-
system among them. In this case, although the
of perceptions is strictly determined, and al-
all-knnwt formula of Adam’s substance an
sion it establish with certainty Adam’s deci-
not nick thp « ^ possible that Adam might
tue of thp fh^ \ means only that there exists by vir-
syLm o cot understanding another
divine thou&htf Th- possible is uniquely that of the
Which h“bS“re?S T “
tivity has hepn hp-ra. u j ' course the idea of subjec-
with a divine consciout its limit, for we are dealing
ss, not mine; and if we have at the
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 149
outset made a point of confusing subjectivity and finitude,
subjectivity disappears when the understanding becomes in-
finite. Yet the fact remains that the possible is a thought
which is only thought. Leibniz himself seems to have wished
to confer an autonomy and a sort of peculiar weight on possi-
bilities, for several of the metaphysical fragments published by
Couturat show us possibles organizing themselves into systems
of co-possibles in which the fullest and richest tend by them-
selves to be realized. But there is here only a suggestion of
such a doctrine, and Leibniz has not developed it — doubtless
because he could not do so. To give possibles a tendency to-
ward being means either that the possible is already in full
being and that it has the same type of being — ^in the sense
that we grant to the bud a tendency to become a flower — or
else that the possible in the bosom of the divine understanding
is already an idea-force and that the maximum of idea-forces
organized in a system, automatically releases the divine will.
But in the latter case we do not get out of the subjective.
K then we define possible as non-contradictory, it can have
being only as the thought of a being prior to the real world
or prior to the pure consciousness of the world such as it is.
In either case the possible loses its nature as possible and
is reabsorbed in the subjective being of the representation.
But this represented-being of the possible can not account
for its nature; on the contrary it destroys its nature. In the
everyday use which we make of the possible, we can in no
way apprehend it either as an aspect of our ignorance or as
a non-contradictory structure belonging to a world not real-
ized and at the margin of this world. The possible appears to
us as a property of beings. After glancing at the sky I state,
^‘It is possible that it may rain.” I do not understand the
possible” here as meaning “without contradiction with the
present state of the sky.” This possibility belongs to the sky
as a threat; it represents a surpassing on the part of these
clouds, which I perceive, toward rain. The clouds carry this
surpassing within themselves, which means not that the sur-
passing will be realized but only that the structure of being
Of the cloud is a transcendence toward rain. The possibility
ere is given as belonging to a particular being for which it is
xvh'^u^’^' This fact is sufficiently indicated by the way in
ich we say indifferently of a friend for whom we are wait-
It is possible that he may come” or “He can come.”
Us the possible can not be reduced to a subjective reality.
150
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Neither is it prior to the real or to the true. It is a concrete
property of already existing realities. In order for the rain to
be possible, there must be clouds in the sky. To suppress being
in order to establish the possible in its purity is an absurd
attempt. The frequently cited passage from not-being to
being via possibility does not correspond to the real. To be
sure, the possible state does not exist yet; but it is the possible
state of a certain existent which sustains by its being the
possibility and the non-being of its future state.
Certainly we are running the risk of letting these few
remarks lead us to the ^yistotelian “potentiality.” This would
be to fall from Charybdis to Scylla, to avoid the purely logi-
cal conception of possibility only to fall into a magical con-
ception. Being-in-itself can not “be potentiality” or “have
potentialities. In itself it is what it is — in the absolute pleni-
tude of its identity. The cloud is not “potential rain”; it is, in
Itself, a certain quantity of water vapor, which at a given tem-
perature and under a given pressure is strictly what it is. The
m-itself is actuality. But we can conceive clearly enough how
attitude in its attempt to dehumanize the
Z possMities as potentialities and has
S mfr T making of them the pure subjective results
ignorance. The first
mrou^ comes into the world
^^°«ds can change into rain
moon crescent
toward the fiUi ^ ^ surpass the crescent
make of ibp nn was it necessary afterwards to
tivity? Just as^hprl ^ ^ simple ^ven of our psychic subjec-
to the world thmn ^ world only if it comes
can be^ossibSrf? own lack, so there
being Which bfor itself in' "
the pure “ essence coincide with
first rivL ara?obt.r'^^^^'^"^' ^ ^ possibility is not
lar bling SeTthou^V of a particu-
close thf possible wlhiiih^rfTfT® consider it, can not en-
sider possibles in the heart of content. If we con-
content of the divin*. fj, understanding as the
simply '^®y become pur^ and
potheLJSthough^ ^ P^o hy-
negative power could come understand how this
come to a bemg wholly positiv^that
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 151
Ood has the power to deny; i.e., to bring negative judgments
to bear on his representations. Even so we can not understand
how he, could transform these representations into possibles.
At the Very most the result of the negation would be to con-
stitute them as “without real correspondent.” But to say that
the centaur does not exist is by no means to say that it is pos-
sible. Neither affirmation nor negation can confer the charac-
ter of possibility on a representation. K it is claimed that this
character can be given by a synthesis of negation and aflarma-
tion, still we must observe that a synthesis is not a sum and
that it would be necessary to account for this synthesis as an
organic totality provided with its own meaning and not in
terms of the elements of which it is a synthesis. Similarly the
pure subjective and negative attestation of our ignorance con-
cerning the relation to the real of one of our ideas could
not account for the character of possibility in this representa-
tion; it could only put us in a state of indifference with re-
spect to the representation and could not confer on it that
right over the real which is the fundamental structure of the
possible. If it is pointed out that certain tendencies influence
me to expect this in preference to that, we shall say that
these tendencies, far from explaining transcendence, on the
contrary presuppose it; they must already, as we have seen,
exist as a lack. Furthermore if the possible is not given in
some way, these tendencies will be able to inspire us to hope
that my representation may adequately correspond to reality
but they will not be able to confer on me a right over the
real. In a word the apprehension of the possible as such sup-
poses an original surpassing. Every effort to establish the
possible in terms of a subjectivity which would be what is —
that is, which would close in upon itself— is on principle
doomed to failure.
But it is true that the possible is — so to speak — an option
on being, and if it is true that the possible can come into the
world only through a being which is its own possibility, this
implies for human reality the necessity of being its being in
the form of an option on its being. There is possibility
when instead of being purely and simply what I am, I exist
as the Right to be what I am. But this very right separates me
from what I have the right to be. Property right appears only
when someone contests my property, when already in some
respect it is no longer mine. The tranquil enjoyment of what
possess is a pure and simple fact, not a right. Thus if possi-
152
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
bility is to exist, human reality as itself must- necessarily be
something other than itself. This possible is that element of
the For-itself which by nature escapes it qua For-itself. The
possible is a new aspect of the nihil ation of the In-itself in
For-itself.
If the possible can in fact come into the world only
through a being which is its own possibility, this is because
the in-itself, being by nature what it is, can not “have” possi-
bilities. The relation of the in-itself to a possibility can be
established only externally by a being which- stands facing
possibilities. The possibility of being stopped by a fold in the
cloth belongs neither to the billiard ball which rolls nor to the
cloth; it can arise only in the organization into a system of the
ball and the cloth by a being which has a comprehension of
possibles. But since this comprehension can neither come to it
from without — i.e., from the in-itself — ^nor be limited to being
only a thought as the subjective mode of consciousness, it
must coincide with the objective structure of the being which
comprehends its possibles^* To comprehend possibility qua
possibility or to be its own possibles is one and the same
necessity for the being such that in its being, its being is in
question. But to be its own possibility — that is, to be defined
by it is precisely to be defined by that part of itself which
it is not, is to be defined as an escape-from-itself toward
. In short, from the moment that I want to account
for my immediate being simply in so far as it is what it is
not and is not what it is, I am thrown outside it toward a
meaning wluch is out of reach and which can in no way be
confused with immanent subjective representation. Descartes
apprehending himself by means of the cogito as doubt can not
hope to define this doubt as methodological doubt or even as
doubt if he limits himself to what is apprehended by pure
instantaneous observation. Doubt can be understood only in
terms of the always open possibility that future evidence may
remove it; it can be grasped as doubt only in so far as it
refers to possibilities of the which are not yet realized
but always open.
Strictly speaWng, no fact of consciousness is this conscious-
Mss. ven if like Husserl we should quite artificially endow
ms consciousness with intra-structural protentions, these
ou ave in them no way of surpassing the consciousness
^ corrupt, reading d’ xn- Obviously Sartre in-
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 153
whose structure they are and hence would pitifully fall back
on themselves — like flies bumping their noses on the window
without being able to clear the glass. As soon as we wish to
define a consciousness as doubt, perception, thirst, etc., we
are referred to the nothingness of what is not yet. Conscious-
ness (of) reading is not consciousness (of) reading this
letter or this word or this sentence, or even this paragraph; it
is consciousness (of) reading this book, which refers me
to all the pages still unread, to all the pages already read,
which by definition detaches consciousness from itself. A con-
sciousness which would be consciousness of what it is, would
be obliged to spell out each word.
Concretely, each for-itself is a lack of a certain coincidence
with itself. This means that it is haunted by the presence of
that with which it should coincide in order to be itself. But
as this coincidence in Self is always coincidence with Self,
the being which the For-itself lacks, the being which would
make the For-itself a Self by assimilation with it — this being
is still the For-itself. We have seen that the For-itself is a
“presence to itself”; what this presence-to-itself lacks can fail
to appear to it only as presence-to-itself. The determining re-
lation of the for-itself to its possibility is a nihilating re-
laxation of the bond of presence-to-itself; this relaxation
extends to transcendence since the presence-to-itself which the
For-itself lacks is a presence-to-itself which is not. Thus the
For-itself in so far as it is not itself is a presence-to-itself
which lacks a certain presence-to-itself, and it is as a lack
of this presence that it is presence-to-itself. \
Every consciousness lacks something for something. But
it must be understood that the lack does not come to it from
without as in the case of the crescent moon as related to the full
moon. The lack of the for-itself is a lack which it is. The out-
line of a presence-to-itself as that which is lacking to the for-
itself is what constitutes the being of the for-itself as the
foundation of its own nothingness. The possible is an absence
constitutive of consciousness in so far as consciousness itself
Wakes itself. Thirst — for example — ^is never suflSciently thirst
inasmuch as it makes itself thirst; it is haunted by the presence
of the Self of Thirst-itself. But in so far as it is haunted by
mis concrete .value, it puts itself in question in its being as
acking a certain For-itself which would realize it as satisfied
t urst and which would confer on it being-in-itself. This miss-
wg For-itself is the Possible. Actually it is not exact to say
154
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
that a Thirst tends toward its own annihilation as thirst; there
is no consciousness which aims at its own suppression as such.
Yet thirst is a lack, as we pointed out earlier. As such it
wishes to be satisfied; but this satisfied thirst, which would be
realized by s\'nthetic assimilation in an act of coincidence of
the For-itself-desire or Thirst with the For-itself-rcflection or
act of drinking, is not aimed at as the suppression of the
thirst. Quite the contrary the aim is the thirst passed on to the
plenitude of being, the thirst which grasps and incorporates
repletion into itself as the Aristotelian form grasps and trans-
forms matter; it becomes eternal thirst.
This point of view is very late and reflective — ^like that
of the man who drinks to get rid of his thirst, like that of the
man who goes to brothels to get rid of his sexual desire.
Thirst, sexual desire, in the unreflective and naive state want
to enjoy themselves; they seek that coincidence with self
which is satisfaction, where thirst knows itself as thirst at the
same time that the dr inkin g satisfies it, when by the very fact
of its fulfillment it loses its character as lack while making
itself be thirst in and through the satisfaction. Thus Epicurus
is right and wrong at the same time; in itself indeed desire is
an emptiness. But no non-reflective project aims simply at
suppressing this void. Desire by itself tends to perpetuate it-
self, naan clings ferociously to his desires. What desire wishes
to be is a filled emptiness but one which shapes its repletion
as a mould shapes the bronze which has been poured inside
it. The possible of the consciousness of thirst is the conscious-
i^ss of drinking. We know moreover that coincidence vvdth
the self is impossible, for the for-itself attained by the realiza-
tion of the Possible will make itself be as for-itself— that is,
with another horizon of possibilities. Hence the constant dis-
appointment which accompanies repletion, the famous: “Is it
r Qot directed at the concrete pleasure
w c satisfaction gives but at the evanescence of the coinci-
catch a glimpse of the origin of
temporality smce thirst is its possible at the same time that it
nil?/ T pof This nothingness which separates human
reality from itself is at the origin of time. But we shall come
cpn f A n must be noted here is that the For-itself is
reparated from the Presence-to-itself which it lacks and which
separated by Nothing and
Lsn^ch 'T J in the world,
inasmuch as the For-itself. lacking or possible, is For-itself
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 155
as a presence to a certain state of the world. In this sense
the being beyond which the For-itself projects the coinci-
dence with itself is the world or distance of infinite being
beyond which man must be reunited with his possible. We
shall use the expression Circuit of self ness {Circuit de ipseite)
for the relation of the for-itself with the possible which it
is, and “world” for the totality of being in so far as it is
traversed by the circuit of selfness.
We are now in a position to elucidate the mode of being
of the possible. The possible is the something which the For-
itself lacks in order to be itself. Consequently it is not appro-
priate to say that it is qua possible — ^unless by being we are to
understand the being of an existent which “is made-to-be” in
so far as it is made-not-to-be, or if you prefer, the appearance
at a distance of what I am. The possible does not exist as a
pure representation, not even as a denied one, but as a real
lack of being which, qua lack, is beyond being. It has the
being of a lack and as lack, it lacks being. The Possible is not,
the possible is possibilized to the exact degree that the For-
itself makes itself be; the possible determines in schematic out-
line a location in the nothingness which the For-itself is
beyond itself. Naturally it is not at first thematically posited; it
is outlined beyond the world and gives my present perception
its meaning as this is apprehended in the world in the circuit
of selfness. But neither is the Possible ignored or unconscious;
it outlines the limits of the non-thetic self-consciousness as a
non-thetic consciousness. The non-reflective consciousness (of)
thirst is apprehended by means of the glass of water as desir-
able, without putting the Self in the centripetal position as the
end of the desire. But the possible repletion appears as a non-
positional correlate of the non-thetic self-consciousness on the
horizon of the glass-in-the-midst-of-the-world.
V. THE SELF AND THE CIRCUIT
OF SELFNESS
In an article in Recherches Philosophiques I attempted to
show that the Ego does not belong to the domain of the for
Uself.14 1 shall not repeat here. Let us note only the reason for
Tr. The article to which Sartre refers is “La transcendance de I’ego,
wquisse d une description ph6nom6nologique,” Recherches Philosophiques,
VI, 1936-1937, pp. 85-123. [Transcendence of the Ego: An Existential
eory of Consciousness. Noonday, 1957.3
156
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the transcendence of the Ego: as a unifying pole of Erleb-
nisse the Ego is in-itself, not for-itself. If it were of the na-
ture of consciousness, in fact, it would be to itself its own
foundation in the translucency of the immediate. But then we
would have to say that it is what it is not and that it is not
what it is, and this is by no means the mode of being of the
“1.” In fact the consciousness which I have of the “I” never
exhausts it, and consciousness is not what causes it to come
into existence; the “I” is always given as having been there
before consciousness — and at the same time as possessing
depths which have to be revealed gradually. Thus the Ego
appears to consciousness as a transcendent in-itself,. as an exis-
tent in the human world, not as of the nature of conscious-
ness.
Yet we need not conclude that the for-itself is a pure and
simple impersonal” contemplation. But the Ego is far from
being the personalizing pole of a consciousness which without
it would remain in the impersonal stage; on the contrary, it is
consciousness in its fundamental selfness which under certain
conditions allows the appearance of the Ego as the transcen-
dent phenomenon of that selfness. As we have seen, it is actu-
ally impossible to say of the in-itself that it is itself. It
simply IS. In this sense, some will say that the “I,” which
hold to be the inhabitant of consciousness, is the
Me of consciousness but not its own self. Thus through
hypostasizmg^ the being of the for-itself which is reflected-on
and makmg it into an in-itself, these writers fix and destroy
movement of reflection upon the self; consciousness then
would be a pure return to the Ego as to its self, but the Ego
tonrfnr relation has been
transformed into a simple centripetal relation, the center,
moreover, being a nucleus of opacity. We, on the contrary
scToUerV-^-^ ^11 St”:
ralT hv i “finite move-
T it is L idSTiiSt
^senS^rbri ““tfititing reality of the
S bSn the unity of being i a type
ISg moieZt'of^^lfltf consciousness by the pme
what confers npren i makes itself personal; for
Sion of “‘“r T “ ”“"8 “ ”°t the posses-
n bso-which K only the sign of the person^ty—
IMMEDIATE STRUCTURES OF THE FOR-ITSELF 157
but it is the fact that the being exists for itself as a presence
to itself.
Now this first reflective movement involves in addition a
second or selfness. In selfness my possible is reflected on my
consciousness and determines it as what it is. Selfness repre-
sents a degree of nihilation carried further than the pure
presence to itself of the pre-reflective cogito — in the sense
that the possible which I am is not pure presence to the for-
itself as reflection to reflecting, but that it is absent-presence.
Due to this fact the existence of reference as a structure of
being in the for-itself is still more clearly marked. The for-
itself is itself down there, beyond its grasp, in the far reaches
of its possibilities. This free necessity of being — down there —
what one is in the form of lack constitutes self ness or the
second aspect of the person. In fact how can the person be
defined if not as a free relation to himself?
As for the world — i.e., the totality of beings as they exist
within the -compass of the circuit of self ness — ^this can be
only what human reality surpasses toward itself. To borrow
Heidegger’s definition, the world is “that in terms of which
human reality makes known to itself what it is.”^® The possible
which is my possible is a possible for-itself and as such a
presence to the in-itself as consciousness of the in-itself. What
I seek in the face of the world is the coincidence with a for-
itself which I am and which is consciousness of the world. But
this possible which is non-thetically an absent-present to pres-
ent consciousness is not present as an object of a positional
consciousness, for in that case it would be reflected-on. The
satisfied thirst which haunts my actual thirst is not conscious-
ness (of) thirst as a satisfied thirst; it is a thetic consciousness
of itself-drinking-from-a-glass and a non-positional self-con-
sciousness. It then causes itself to be transcended toward the
glass of which it is conscious; and as a correlate of this possible
non-thetic consciousness, the glass-drunk-from haunts the full
glass as its possible and constitutes it as a glass to be drunk
rom. Thus the world by nature is mine in so far as it is the
correlative in-itself of nothingness; that is, of the necessary
0 Stacie beyond which I fimd myself as that which I am in the
orm of having to be it.” Without the world there is no self-
^6ss, no person; without selfness, without the person, there is
world. But the world’s belonging to the person is never
■~-wW h ^ Chapter Three of this Part to what extent this definition
^ we adopt provisionaUy — ^is insufficient and erroneous.
158 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
posited on the level of the pre-rcflcctivc cogito. It would be
absurd to say that the world as it is known is known as mine.
Yet this quality of “my-ness” in the world is a fugitive struc-
ture, always present, a structure which I live. The world {is)
mine because it is haunted by possibles, and the consciousness
of each of these is a possible self-consciousness which I am;
it is these possibles as such which give the world its unity anr*
its meaning as the world.
The examination of negating conduct and of bad faith
has enabled us to approach the ontological study of the cogito,
and the being of the cogito has appeared to us as being-for-
itself. This being, under our observation, has been transcended
toward value and possibilities; we have not been able to keep
it within the substantial limits of the instantaneity of the
Cartesian cogito. But precisely for this reason, we can not be
content with the results which we have just obtained. If the
cogito refuses instantaneity and if it is transcended toward its
possibles, this can happen only within a temporal surpassing.
It is “in time” that the for-itself is its own possibilities in the
mode of “not being”; it is in time that my possibilities appear
on the horizon of the world which they make mine. If, Aen,
human reality is itself apprehended as temporal, and if the
meaning of its transcendence is its temporality, we can not
hope to elucidate the being of the for-itself until we have
described and determined the significance of the Temporal.
Only then shall we be able to approach the study of the
problem which concerns us: that of the original relation of
consciousness to being.
CHAPTER TWO
Temporality
I. PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE THREE
TEMPORAL DIMENSIONS
Temporality is evidently an organized structure. The three
so-called “elements” of time, past, present, and future, should
not be considered as a collection of “givens” for us to sum
up — for example, as an infinite series of “nows” in which
some are not yet and others are no longer — ^but rather as
the structured moments of an original synthesis. Otherwise
we will immediately meet with this paradox; the past is no
longer; the future is not yet; as for the instantaneous pres-
ent, everyone knows that this does not exist at all but is the
lunit of an infinite division, like a point without dimension.
Thus the whole series is annihilated and doubly so since
the future “now,” for example, is a nothingness qua future
and will be realized in nothingness when it passes on to the
state of a present “now.” The only possible method by
which to study temporality is to approach it as a totality
which dominates its secondary structures and which confers
on them their meaning. We will never lose sight of this
fact Nevertheless we can not launch into an examination
of the being of Time without a preliminary clarification of
the too often obscure meaning of the three dimensions by
means of pre-ontological, phenomenological description. We
must, however, consider this phenomenological description
160 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
as merely a provisional work whose goal is only to enable
us to attain an intuition of temporality as a whole. -In par-
ticular our description must enable us to see each dimension
appear on the foundation of temporal totality without our
ever forgetting the Unselbstdndigkeit of that dimension.
A. The Past
Every theory concerning memory implies the presupposition
of the being of the past. These presuppositions, which have
never been elucidated, have obscured the problem of mem-
ory and that of temporality in general. Once and for all we
must raise the question; what is the being of a, past being?
Common opinion vacillates between two equally vague con-
ceptions. The past, it is said, is no longer. From this point
of view it seems that being is to be attributed to the present
alone. This ontological presupposition has engendered the
famous theory of cerebral impressions. Since the past is no
more, since it has melted away into nothingness, if the
memory continues to exist, it must be by virtue of a present
modification of our being; for example, this will be an im-
print at present stamped on a group of cerebral cells. Thus
everything is present; the body, the present perception, and
the past as a present impression in the body — all is actuality;
for the impression does not have a virtual existence qua
memory; it is altogether an actual impression. If the mem-
ory is reborn, it is in the present as the re.sult of a present
process, as a rupture in the protoplasmic equilibrium in the
cellular group under consideration. Psycho-physiological par-
allelism, which is instantaneous and extra-temporal, is there
to explain how this physiological process is the correlate of
a phenomenon strictly psychic but equally present — ^the ap-
pearance of the memory-image in consciousness. The more
recent idea of an engram adds nothing except that it cloaks
the theory in a pseudo-scientific terminology.
But if everything is present, how are we to explain the
passivity of the memory; that is, the fact that in its inten-
tion a consciousness which remembers transcends the present
in order to aim at the event back there where it was. I have
shown elsewhere that there is no way of distinguishing the
image from perception if we begin by making the image a
renascent perception." We shall meet the same impossibili-
^L’lmaginaUon, 1936.
TEMPORALITY
161
ties here. But in addition we thus remove the method of dis-
tinguishing the memory from the image; neither the “feeble-
ness” of the memory, nor its pallor, nor its incompleteness,
nor the contradictions it shows with the givens of percep-
tion can distinguish it from a fiction-image since it offers
the same characteristics.
Furthermore since these characteristics are present quali-
ties of the memory, they can not enable us to get out of the '
present in order to direct ourselves toward the past. In vain
will we invoke the memory’s quality of belonging to me — ^its
“myness,” following Claparede, or its “intimacy,” according to
James. Either these characteristics manifest only a present at-
mosphere which envelops the memory — and then they remain
present and refer to the present, or else they are already a re-
lation to the past as such — and then they presuppose what
they must explain. Some scholars have believed they might
easily get rid of the problem by reducing memory to an im-
plied pattern of localization and this to an ensemble of intel-
lectual operations facilitated by the existence of “social con-
texts of memory.” No doubt these operations exist and ought
to be the object of psychological investigation. But if the
relation to the past is not given in some manner, these opera-
tions can hot create it. In a word, if we begin by isolating
man on the instantaneous island of his present, and if all his
modes of being as soon as they appear are destined by nature
to a perpetual present, we have radically removed all methods
of understanding his original relation to the past. We shall not
succeed in constituting the dimension “past” out of elements
borrowed exclusively from the present any more than “ge-
neticists” have succeeded in constituting extension from unex-
tended elements.
Popular consciousness has so much trouble in refusing a
real existence to the past that alongside the thesis just dis-
cussed it admits another conception equally unprecise, ac-
cording to which the past would have a kind of honorary
existence. Being past for an event would mean simply being
r^ired, losing its efficacy without losing its being. Bergson’s
philosophy has made use of this idea: on going into the past
event does not cease to be; it merely ceases to act and
remains “in its place” at its date for eternity. In this way
cing has been restored to the past, and it is very well
one; we even affirm that duration is a multiplicity of inter-
162 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
penetration and that the past is continually organized mth
the present. But for all that we have not provided any reason
for this organization and this interpenetration; we have not
explained how the past can “be reborn” to haunt us, in short
to exist for us. If it is unconscious, as Bergson claims, and if
the unconscious is inactive, how can it weave itself into the
woof of our present consciousness? Would it have a force of
its own? But then isn’t this force present since it acts on the
present? How does it emanate from the past as such? Shall we
reverse the question, as Husserl does, and show in the present
consciousness a game of “retentions,” which latch on to the
consciousnesses of yesteryear, maintain them at their date, and
prevent them from being annihilated? But if Husserl’s cogito
is first given as instantaneous, there is no way to get outside it
We saw in the preceding chapter how protentions^ batter in
vain on the window-panes of the present without shattering
them. The same goes for retentions. Husserl for the length
of his philosophical career was haunted by the idea of tran-
scendence and suipassing. But the philosophical techniques
at his disposal, in particular his idealist conception of exis-
tence, removed from him any way of accounting for that tran-
scendence; his intentionality is o:dy the caricature of it Con-
sciousness, as Husserl conceived it, can not in reality
transcend itself either toward the world or toward the future
or toward the past.
Thus we have gained nothing by conceding being to the
past for by the terms of this concession, the past must be for
us as not-being. Whether the past is, as Bergson and Husserl
claiin, or is not any longer, as Descartes claims, is hardly of
any importance if we are to begin by cutting down all bridges
between it and our present
^ fact if we confer a privilege on the present by making
it a presence in the world” we must then attack the problem
of the past in the perspective of intra-mundane being. People
consider that we exist first as contemporary with this chair
or this table, and they work out the meaning of the temporal
by means of the world. But if we thus place ourselves in
&e midst of the world, we lose aU possibility of distinguish-
ing wlmt no longer is from what is not. Someone may object
at what no longer is must at least have been, whereas what
of ^ ^ forward dimension of consciousness, the opposite
TEMPORALITY
163
is not has no connection of any kind with being. That is true.
But the law of being of the intra-mundane instant, as we have
seen, can be expressed by the simple words, “Being is,” which
indicate a massive plenitude of positivities where nothing
which is not can be represented in any way whatsoever, not
even by an impression, an emptiness, an appeal, or an “hyster-
esis.” Being which is wholly exhausts itself in being; it has
nothing to do with what is not, or with what is no longer. No
negation, whether radical or subdued in a “no longer,” can find
a place in this absolute density. Hence the past can exist in its
own way, but the bridges are cut. Being has not even “forgot-
ten” its past, for forgetting would still be a form of connec-
tion. T^e past ' has slipped away from it like a dream.
Descartes’ concept and Bergson’s- can be dismissed side by
side because they are both subject to the same objection.
Whether it be a question of annihilating the past or of pre-
serving for it the existence of a household god, these authors
have considered its condition apart, isolating it from the
present. Whatever may be' their concept of consciousness, they .
have conferred on it the existence of the in-itself; they have'
considered it as being what it is. There is no reason to won-
der afterwards that they fail, to reconnect the past to the pres-
ent, for the present thus conceived will reject the past with
all its strength. If they had considered the temporal phenom-
enon in its totality, they would have seen that “my” past is
first of all mine; that is, that it exists as the function of a
certain being which I am. The past is not nothing; neither is
it the present; but at its very source it is bound to a certain
present and to a certain future, to both of which it belongs.
That “myness” of which Claparede speaks is not a subjective
nuance which comes to shatter the memory; it is an ontolog-
ical relation which unites the past to the present. My past
never appears isolated in its “pastness”; it would be absurd
even to imagine that it can exist as such. It is originally the
past of this present. It is as such that it must be first elu-
cidated.
I write that Paul in 1920 was a student at the Polytech-
nic School. Who is it who “was”? Paul evidently, but what
K young man of 1920? But the only tense of the
verb to be” which suits Paul considered in 1920 — so far as
^ quality of being a Polytechnic student is attributed to him
« present. In so far as he was, we must say of him —
® IS. If it is a Paul now -become past who was a student
164 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
at the Polytechnic School, all connection with the present is
broken: the man who sustained that qualification, the sub-
ject, has remained back there with his attribute in 1920. If we
want remembering to remain possible, v/c must on this
hypothesis admit a recollecting synthesis which stems from the
present in order to maintain the contact v/ith the past. This
is a synthesis impossible to conceive if it is not a mode of
original being. Failing such a synthesis, we will have to aban-
don the past to its superb isolation. Moreover what would
such a division in the personality signify? Proust, of course,
admits the successive plurality of the Selves but this concept,
if we take it literally, makes us fall into those insurmountable
difficulties which in their time the Association School came up
against.
Someone perhaps will suggest the hypothesis of a per-
manence in change; the one who was a pupil at the Poly-
technic is this same Paul who existed in 1 920 and who exists
at present. It is he then of whom, after having said, “He is
a pupil at Polytechnic,” we say at present, “He is a former
student at the Polytechnic.” But this resort to permanence
can not get us out of our difficulty. If nothing comes to turn
the flow of the “nows” backward and so constitute the tem-
poral series and permanent characteristics within this series,
then permanence is nothing but a certain instantaneous con-
tent without even the density of each individual “nov/.” It
is necessary that there be a past, and consequently something
or someone who was this past, in order for there to be
permanence. Far from helping to constitute time, permanence
presupposes it in order to reveal itself and to reveal change
along with it.
We return then to what wc caught a glimpse of earlier.
If the existential remanence of being in the form of the past
does not arise originally from my actual present, if my past of
yesterday does not exist as a transcendence behind my pres-
ent of today, we have lost all hope of reconnecting the past
with the present. If then I say of Paul that he was once or that
he was for a continued period a student at the Polytechnic, I
am speaking of this same Paul who is at the present time and
concerning whom I say also that he is now forty years old. It
IS not the adolescent who was at the Polytechnic, Concern-
ing the latter, for so long as he was, we have to say: he is.
It is the forty-year-old who was the student. Actually the
tmrty-year-old was the student also. But again what would
TEMPORALITY
165
this man of thirty years be without the man of forty who was
he? It is at the extreme limit of his present that this man of
forty “was” a student at the Polytechnic. Finally it is the very
being of the Erlebnis which has the task of .being a man of
forty, a man of thirty, and an adolescent — all in the mode of
having been. Concerning this Erlebnis, we say today that it is;
we say also of the man of forty and of the adolescent in their
time that they are; today they form a part of the past, and the
past itself is in the sense that at present it is the past of Paul
or of this Erlebnis. Thus the particular tenses of the perfect
indicate beings who all really exist although in diverse modes
of being, but of which the one is and at the same time was the
other. The past is characterized as the past of something or of
somebody; one has a past. It is this instrument, this society,
this man who have~their past. There is not first a universal
past which would later' be particularized in concrete pasts. On
the contrary, it is. particular pasts which we discover first.
The true problem — ^which we shall attack in the following
chapter — ^will be to find out by what process these individual
pasts can be united so as to form the past.
Someone may object perhaps that we have weighted the
scale by choosing an example in which the subject who “was”
still exists in the present. We will cite other cases. For ex-
ample, I can say of Pierre, who is dead: “He loved music.”
In this case, the subject like the attribute is past. There is no
living Pierre in terms of which this past-being can arise. But
We conceive of such a subject. We conceive of him even to
the point of recognizing that for Pierre the taste for music
has never been past. Pierre has always been contemporary
with this taste, which was his taste; his living personality has
not survived it, nor has it survived the personality. Conse-
quently here what is past is Pierre-loving-music. And I can
pose the question which I raised earlier: of whom is this past
Pierre Ae past? It can not be in relation to a universal Present
which is a pure affirmation of being; it is then the past of
actuality. And in fact Pierre has been for-me, and I have
been for-him. As we shall see, Pierre’s existence has touched
luy inmost depths; it formed a part of a present “in-the-
world, for-me and for-others” which was my present during
lerre s lifetime — a present which I have been. Thus concrete
0 jects which have disappeared are past in so far as they form
^ part of the concrete past of a survivor. “The terrible thing
^ out Death,” said Malraux, “is that it transforms life into
166 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Destiny.” By this we must understand that death reduces the
for-itself-for-others to the state of simple for-others. Today
I alone am responsible for the being of the dead Pierre, I in
my freedom. Those dead who have not been able to be saved
and transported to the boundaries of the concrete past of a
survivor are not past; they along with their pasts are annihi-
lated.
There are then beings which “have” pasts. Just now we
referred indifferently to an instrument, a society, a man. Was
this right? Can we at the outset attribute a past to all finite
existents or only to certain categories among them? This can
be more easily determined if we examine more closely this very
particular notion — “to have” a past. One can not “have” a
past as one “has” an automobile or a racing stable. That is,
the past can not be possessed by a present being which re-
mains strictly external to it as I remain, for example, external
to my fountain pen. In short, in the sense that possession
ordinarily expresses an external relation of the possessor to the
possessed, the expression of possession is madequate. External
relations would hide an impassable abyss between a past and a
present which would then be two factual givens without real
communication. Even the absolute interpenetration of the pres-
ent by the past, as Bergson conceives it, does not resolve the
difficulty because this interpenetration, which is the organiza-
tion of the past with the present, comes ultimately from the
past itself and is only a relation of habitation. The past can
indeed be conceived as being in the present, but by making
it such we have removed all ways of presenting this imma-
nence other than like that of a stone at the bottom of the river.
The past indeed can haunt the present but it can not be the
present; it is the present which is its past.
Therefore if we study the relations of the past to the
present in terms of the past, we shall never establish internal
relations between them. Consequently an in-itself, whose pres-
ent is what it is, can not “have” a past. The examples, cited
by Chevallier in support of his thesis, and in particular the
facts of hysteresis, do not allow us to establish any action by
the past of matter upon its present state. There is no one of
these examples, in fact, which can not be explained by the
ordmary means of mechanistic deter mini s m . Of these two
nails, Chevallier tells us, the one has just been made and has
nev^ een used, the other has been bent, then straightened by
strokes of the hammer; they appear absolutely similar. Yet at
TEMPORALITY
167
\
the first blow the one will sink straight into the wall, and the
other will be bent again; this is the action of the past. Accord-
ing to our view, a little bad faith is needed in order to see the
action of the past in this example. In place of this unintel-
ligible explanation in terms of being which here is density, we
may easily substitute the only possible^ explanation: the ex-
ternal appearances of these nails are similar, but their present
molecular structures perceptibly differ. The present molecular
state is at each instant the strict result of the prior molecular
state, which for the scientist certainly does not mean
that there is a “passage” from one instant to the next within
the permanence of the past but merely an irreversible relation
between the contents of two instants of physical time. Simi-
larly, to offer as proof of this permanence of the past the
remanence of magnetization in a piece of soft iron is not to
prove anything worthwhile. Here we are with a phenomenon
which outlives its cause, not with a subsistence of the cause
qua cause in the past state. For a long time after the stone
which pierced the water has fallen to the bottom of the sea,
concentric waves still pass over its surface; here nobody makes
an appeal to some sort of action by the past to explain this
phenomenon; the mechanism of it is almost visible. It does
not seem that the facts of hysteresis or of remanence need
any explanation of a different type.
In fact it is very clear that the expression “to have a past,”
which leads us to suppose a mode of possession in which the
possessor can be passive and which as such can without vio-
lence be applied to matter, should be replaced by the expres-
sion “to be its own past.” There is a past only for a present
which can not exist without being its past — back there, behind
itself; that is, only those beings have a past which are such
that in their being, their past being is in question, those
beings who have to be their past. These observations enable us
to refuse a priori to grant a past to the in-itself (which does
not mean, however, that we must confine it within the pres-
ent), We shall not thus settle once and for all the question of
the past of living beings. We shall only observe that if it were
necessary — ^which is by no means certain — ^to grant a past to
ffe, this could be done only after having proved that the being
of life is such that it allows a past. In short, it would be neces-
sary first to prove that living matter is something other than a
physical-chemical system. The opposite attempt — that of Che-
V ler which consists in putting the strongest emphasis on the
168 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
past as constitutive of originality in life, is an vcrrepov rponpov
completely void of meaning. For Human Reality alone the ex-
istence of a past is manifest because it has been established
that human reality has to be what it is. It is through the for-
itself that the past arrives in the world because its “I am” is
in the form of an I am me.
What then is the meaning of “was”? We see first of all
that it is transitive. If I say, “Paul is fatigued ” one might
perhaps argue that the copula has an ontological value, one
might perhaps want to see there only an indication of inher-
ence. But when we say, “Paul was fatigued,” the essential
meaning of the “was” leaps to our eyes: the present Paul is
actually responsible for having had this fatigue in the past. If
he were not sustaining this fatigue with his being, he would
not even have forgotten that state; there would be rather a
“no-longer-being” strictly identical with a “not-being.” The
fatigue would be lost. The present being therefore is the
foundation of its own past; and it is the present’s char-
acter as a foundation which the “was” manifests. But we are
not to understand that the present founds the past in the
mode of indifference and without being profoundly modified
by it. “Was” means that the present being has to be in its
being the foundation of its past while being itself this past.
What does this mean? How can the present be the past?
The crux of the question lies evidently in the term “was,”
which, serving as intermediary between the present and the
past, is itself neither wholly present nor wholly past. In fact it
can be neither the one nor the other since in either case it
would be contained inside the tense which would denote its
being. The term “was” indicates the ontological leap from
the present into the past and represents an original synthesis
of these two temporal modes. What must we understand by
this synthesis?
I see first that the term “was” is a mode of being. In this
sense I am my past. I do not have it; I am it. A remark
made by someone concerning an act which I performed
yesterday or a mood which I had does not leave me indiffer-
ent; I am hurt or flattered, I protest or I let it pass; I am
touched to the quick. I do not dissociate myself from my past.
Of course, in time I can attempt this dissociation; I can de-
clare that "I am no longer what I was,” argue that there has
een a ch^ge, progress. But this is a matter of a secondary
reaction which is given as such. To deny my solidarity of
TEMPORALITY
169
being with my past at this or that particular point is to affirm
it for the whole of my life. At my limit, at that infinitesimal
instant of my death, I shall be no more than my past. It alone
will define me. This is what Sophocles wants to express in the
Trachinae when he has Deianeira say, “It is a proverb
current for a long time among men that one can not pass
judgment on the life of mortals and say if it has been happy
or unhappy, until their death.” This is also the meaning of
that sentence of Malraux’ w^ich we quoted earlier; “Death
changes life into Destiny.” Finally this is what strikes the
Believer when he realizes with terror that at the moment of
death the chips are down, there remains not a card to play.
Death reunites us with ourselves. Eternity has changed us into
ourselves. At the moment of death we are; that is, we are de-
fenceless before the judgments of others. They can decide
in truth what we are; ultimately we have no longer any
chance of escape from what an all knowing intelligence could
do. A last hour repentance is a desperate effort to crack all
this being which^ has slowly congealed and solidified around
us, a final leap to dissociate ourselves from what we are. In
vain. Death fixes this leap along with the rest; it does no more
than to enter into combination with what has preceded it, as
one factor among others, as one particular determination
which is understood only in terms of the totality. By death
the for-itself is changed forever into an in-itself in that it
has slipped entirely into the past. Thus the past is the ever
growing totality of the in-itself which we are.
Nevertheless so long; as we are not dead, we are not this
in-itself in the mode of identity. We have to be it. Or-
dinarily a grudge against a man ceases with his death; this
is because he has been reunited with his past; he is it without,
however, being responsible for it. So long as he lives, he is
the object of my grudge; that is, I reproach him for his past
not only in so far as he is it but in so far as he reassumes it
nt each instant and sustains it in being, in so far as he is
responsible for it. It is not true that the grudge fixes the man
in what he was; otherwise it would survive death. It is ad-
ressed to the living man who in his being is freely what he
was. I am my past and if I were not, my past would not
exist any longer either for me or for anybody. It would no
onger have any relation with the present. That certainly does
no mean that it would not be, but only that its being would
e nndiscoverable. I am the one by whom my past arrives in
170 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
this world. But it must be understood that I do not give
being to it. In other words it does not exist as “my” represen-
tation. It is not because I “represent” my past that it exists.
But it is because I am my past that it enters into the world,
and it is in terms of its being-in-the-world that I can by
applying a particular psychological process represent it to
myself.
The past is what I have to be, and yet its nature is different
from that of my possibles. The possible, which also 1
have to be, remains as my concrete possible, that whose oppo-
site is equally possible — although to a less degree. The past,
on the contrary, is that which is without possibility of any
sort; it is that which has consumed its possibilities. 1 have to
be that which no longer depends on my being-able-to-be, that
which is already in itself all which it can be. The past which
I am, I have to be with no possibility of not being it. I assume
the total responsibility for it as if I could change it, and yet
I can not be anything other than it We shall see later that we
continually preserve the possibility of changing the meaning
of the past in so far as this is an ex-present which has had a
future. But from the content of the past as such I can remove
nothing, and I can add nothing to it In other words the past
which / was is what it is; it is an m-itself like the things in
the world. The relation of being which I have to sustain with
the past is a relation of the type of 'the in-itself — that is, an
identification with itself.
On the other hand I am not my past. I am not it because
I was it. The malice of others always surprises me and
makes me indignant How can they hate in the person who I
am now that person who I was? The wisdom of antiquity has
always insisted on this fact: I can make no pronouncement on
myself which has not already become false at the moment
when I pronounce it. Hegel did not disdain to employ this
argument. Whatever I am .doing, whatever I am saying —
at the moment when I wish to be it, already I was doing it, I
was saying it. But let us, examine this aphorism more carefully.
It amounts to saying that every judgment which I make con-
cerning myself is already false when I make it; that is, that I
have becom<5 something else. But what are we to understand
by this something else? If we understand by it a mode of hu-
man reality which would enjoy the same existential type as
mat to which we refuse present existence, this amounts to
ec anng that we have committed an error in attributing a
TEMPORALITY 171
predicate to the subject and that there remains another pred-
icate which could be attributed; it would only have been
necessary to aim at it in the immediate future. In the same
way a hunter who aims at a bird there -where he sees it misses
it because the bird is no longer at that place when the bullet
arrives there. He will hit the bird if, on the contrary, he aims
a little in advance at a point where the flying bird has not
yet arrived. If the bird is no longer at this place, it is because
it is already at another. At all events it is somewhere. But we
shall see that this Eleatic concept of motion is profoundly
erroneous; if we can say that the arrow is at A, B, etc., then
motion really is a succession of points at rest. Similarly if we
conceive that there has been an infinitesimal instant no longer
existing at which I was what I already no longer am, then we
are constituting the “me” out of a series of fixed states which
succeed each other like images from a magic lantern. If I am
nof what I pronounced myself to be, this is not because of
a slight cleavage betweeH judicative thought and being, not
because of a retardation between the judgment and the fact,
but because on principle in my immediate being in the pres-
ence of my present, I am not it. In short the reason why I
am not what I was is not that there is a change, a becoming
conceived as a passage to heterogeneity taking place in the
homogeneity of being; on the contrary, a becoming is possible
there only because on principle my being and my modes
of being are heterogeneous.
The explanation of the world by means of becoming,
conceived as a synthesis of being and of non-being, is easily
given. But it must be noted that being in becoming could be
this synthesis only if it were so to itself in an act which
would establish its own nothingness. If already I am no longer
what I was, it is still necessary that I have to be so in the
unity of a nihilating synthesis which I myself sustain in
being; otherwise I would have no relation of any sort with
what I am no longer, and my full positivity would be exclu-
sive of the non-being essential to becoming. Becoming can not
be a^ given, a mode of immediate being for being; if we con-
ceive of such a being, then being and non-being would be
only juxtaposed in its heart, and no imposed or external
s ructure could melt them into each other, bond between
uon-being can be only internal. Tt Is within being
non-being must arise, and within non-bcing
at bemg must spring up; and this relation can not be a fact,
172
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
a natural law, but an upsurge of the being which is its own
nothingness of being. If then I am not my own past, this can
not be in the original mode of becoming; the truth is that
I have to be it in order not to be it and I have not to be it in
order to be it. This ought to clarify for us the nature of the
mode “was”; if I am not what I was, it is not because I have
already changed, which would suppose a time already given,
but because I am related to my being in the mode of an
internal bond of non-being.
"Hius it is in so far as I am my past that I can not-be it;
it is even this very necessity of being my past which is the
only possible foundation of the fact that I am not it Other-
wise at each instant I should neither be it nor not be it save
in the eyes of a strictly external witness who, moreover, would
himself have to be his past in the mode of non-being.
These remarks can show us that there is something in-
exact in that scepticism of Heraclitean origin which insists
solely on the fact that I already no longer am what I say I
am. Of course, no matter what someone says that I am, I
am not it. But it is incorrect to affirm that I am already no
^ ^ here “being in
Itself. On the other hand, neither does it follow that I am
makmg an error in saying that I am it, since it is very
necessapr that I be it in order not to be it: I am it in the
mode of was.”
. whatever I can be said to be in the sense of being-
n 1 se with a full, compact density (he is quick-tempered,
he IS a ci^^ servant, he is dissatisfied) is always /ny pj. It is
^ ^ hand, that
dSrf absolute
k ""T ’ connections. If I was happy
it does nnt ^®ans that I am not happy. But
L hannrnnr?\?^' ^ i^^it simply that I can
I thus carrv mvV because I have a past that
and onlPJhM be^d me; rather the past is precisely
what I am from A which obliges me to be
-f behind. This is the meaning of the “was ” Bv
Obligltl of a^umiS
its Line’ onfv hr"" except for itself. It can assume
J^ncftrZ It teioTIvIhf ‘ P"'' “ “
in the mode of th • -f" tc affirmation that I am
the mode of the in-itself, I escape that affirmation, for in
TEMPORALITY
173
its very nature it implies a negation. Thus the for-itself is
always beyond That which it is by the very fact that it is it
for-itself and that it has to be it. But at the same time the
being which lives behind it is indeed its being, and not an-
other being. Thus we understand the meaning of the “was,”
which meirely characterizes the type of being of the for-itself
— i.e., the relation of Ae for-itself to its being. The past is the
in-itself which I am, but I am this in-itself as surpassed.
It remains for us to study the specific way in which the
for-itself “was” its own past. Now we know that the for-itself
appears in the original act by which the in-itself nihilates
itself in order to foimd itself. The for-itself is its own founda-
tion in so far as it makes itself the failure of the in-itself to be
its own foundation. But for all that the for-itself has not suc-
ceeded in freeing itself from the in-itself. The surpassed in-it-'
self lives on and haunts the for-itself as its original contingency.
The for-itself can never reach the in-itself nor apprehend
itself as being this or that, but neither can it prevent it-
self from being what it is — at a distance from itself. This
'contingency of the for-itself, this weight surpassed and pre-
served in the very surpassing — ^this is Facticity. But it is also
the past. “Facticity” and “Past” are two words to indicate one
and the same thing. The Past, in fact, like Facticity, is the
invulnerable contingency of the in-itself which I have to be,
without any possibility of not being it. It is the inevitability
of the necessity of fact, not by virtue of necessity but by
virtue of fact. It is the being of fact, which can not deter-
mme the content of my motivations but which paralyzes them
with its contingency because they can neither suppress it nor
change it; it is what they necessarily carry with them in order
to modify it, what they preserve in order to flee it, what
they have to be in their very effort not to be it; it is that in
terms of which they make themselves what they are. It is this
bemg wWch is responsible for the fact that each instant I am
not a diplomat or a sailor, that I am a professor, although I
can only play this being as a role and although I can never
be united with it. If I can not re-enter into the past, it is not
because some magical power puts it beyond my reach but
^ply because it is in-itself and because I am for-myself.
he past is what I am without being able to live it The past is
su stance. In this sense the Cartesian cogito ought to be
° rather: “I think; therefore I was.”
hat deceives us is the apparent homogeneity of the past
174 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
and the present. For that shame which I experienced yester-
day was part of the for-itself when I experienced it. We be-
lieve then that it has remained for-itself today; we wrongly
conclude that if I can not re-enter it, this is because it no
longer exists. But we must reverse the relation in order to
reach the truth. Between past and present there is an absolute
heterogeneity; and if I can not enter the past, it is because
the past is. The only way by which I could be it is for me
myself to become in-itself in order to lose myself in it in the
form of identification; this by definition is denied me. In
fact that shame which I experienced yesterday and which was
shame for itself is always shame in the present, and its essence
can still be described as for-itself. But its being is no longer
for itself since it no longer exists as reflection-reflecting.
Though capable of description as for-itself, it simply is. The
past is given as a for-itself become in-itself. That shame, so
long as I live it, is not what it is. Now that I it, I can
say: it was shame. It has become what it was — ^behind me. It
has the permanence and the constancy of the in-itself; it is at
its date for eternity; it has the total adherence of the in-itself
to itself.
In one sense then the past, which is at the same time
for-itself and in-itself, resembles value or self, which we de-
scribed in the preceding chapter; for it represents a certain
synthesis of the being which is what it is not and is not
what it is — ^with the being which is what it is. It is in this
sense that we can speak of the evanescent value of the past.
Hence arises the fact that memory presents to us the being
which we were, accompanied by a plenitude of being which
confers on it a sort of poetry. That grief which we /zacf— al-
though fixed in the past — does not cease to present the mean-
ing of a for-itself, and yet it exists in itself with the sUent
fixity of the grief of another, of the grief of a statue. It no
longer needs to appear before itself in order to make itself
exist. On the contrary it is its character of for-itself; far from
being the mode of being of its being, it becomes simply one
way of being, a quality. Psychologists because they contem-
plated the psychic state in the past have claimed that con-
sciousness was a quality which could affect the psychic state
or not without modifying it in its being. The past psychic
first is; and then it is for itself — ^just as Pierre is blond, as that
'' tree is an oak.
But precisely for this reason the past which resembles
TEMPORALITY
175
value is not value. In value the for-itself becomes itself by
surpassing and by founding its being; there is a recovery of
the in-itself by the self. As a result, the contingency of being
gives way to necessity. The past on the contrary is at the start
m-itself. The for-itself is sustained in being by the in-itself;
its raison d’etre is no longer being for-itself. It has become
in-itself, and as a result it appears to us in its pure contin-
gency. There is no reason for our past to be this or that; it
appears in the totality of its series as the pure fact for which
we must account qua fact, as the gratuitous. In short, it is
value reversed— the for-itself recovered by the in-itself and
fixed by it, penetrated and blinded by the full density of the
in-itself, thickened by the in-itself to the point of no longer
being able to exist as a reflection for the reflecting nor as the
reflecting for the reflection, but simply as an in-itself indica-
tion of the dyad reflecting-reflection. This is why the past
can, if need be, be the object aimed at by a for-itself which
wants to realize value and flee the anguish which comes to it
from the perpetual absence of the self. But in essence it is
radically distinct from value; it is precisely the indicative
from which no imperative can be deduced; it is the unique
fact for each for-itself, the contingent and unalterable fact
which I was.
Thus the Past is a For-itself reapprehended and inundated
by the In-itself. How can this happen? We have described the
meaning of being-past for an event and of having a past for a
human reality. We have seen that the Past is an ontological
law of the For-itself; that is, everything which can be a For-
itself must be it back there behind itself, out of reach. It is
in this sense that we can accept the statement of Hegel:
*Wesen ist was gewesen ist.” My essence is in the past; the
past is the law of its being. But we have not explained why a
concrete event of the For-itself becomes past. How does a
For-itself which was its past become the Past which a new
For-itself has to be? The passage to the past is a modification
of being. What is this modification? In order to understand
wis we must first apprehend the relation of the present For-
tlf n Thus as we might have foreseen, the study of
me Past refers us to that of the Present.
B. The ^resent
^ contrast to the Past which is in-itself, the Present is for-
• 0 . What is its being? There is a peculiar paradox in the
176 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Present: On the one hand, we willingly define it as being;
what is present is — ^in contrast to the future which is not
yet and to the past which is no longer. But on the other hand,
a rigorous analysis which would attempt to rid the present of
all which is not it— i.e., of the past and of the imme^ate
future — would find that nothing remained but an infinitesi-
mal instant. As Husserl remarks in his Essays on the Inner
Consciousness of Time, the ideal limit of a division pushed to
infini ty is a nothingness. Thus each time that we approach
the study of human reality from a new point of view we re-
discover that indissoluble dyad. Being and Nothingness.
What is the fundamental meaning of the Present? It is
clear that what exists in the present is distinguished from aU
other existence by the characteristic of presence. At roll caU
the soldier or the pupil replies “Present!” in the sense of
adsum. Present is opposed to absent as well as to past. Thus
the meaning of present is presence to . It is appropriate
then to ask ourselves to what the present is presence and who
or what is present. That will doubtless enable us to elucidate
subsequently the very being of the present.
My present is to be present Present to what? To this
table, to this room, to Paris, to the world, in short to
being-in-itself. But can we say conversely that being-in-itself is
present to me and to the being-in-itself which it is not? If
that were so, the present would be a reciprocal relation of
. , presences. But it is easy to see that it is nothing of the sort.
Presence to ^is an internal relation between the being
which is present and the beings to which it is present. In any
case it can not be a matter of a simple external relation of
contiguity. Presence to vindicates existence outside one-
self near to Anything which can be present to — *
must be such in its being that there is in it a relation of being
with other beings. I can be present to this chair only if I am
united to it in an ontological relation of synthesis, only if I
am there in the being of the chair as not being the chair. A
being which is present to can not be at rest “in-itself”;
the in-itself can not be present any more than it can be Past. It
simply is. There can be no question of any kind of simul-
taneity between one in-itself and another in-itself except from
the point of view of a being which would be co-present with
which would have in it the power of pres-
®ce. The Present therefore can be only the presence of the
or-itself to being-in-itself. And this presence can not be the
TEMPORALITY
177
effect of an accident, of a concomitance; on the contrary it
is presupposed by all concomitance, and it must be an ontolog-
ies structure of the For-itself. This table must be present to
that chair in a world which human reality haunts as a pres-
ence. In other words one cannot conceive of a type of existent
which would be first For-itself in order subsequently to be
present to being. But the For-itself makes itself presence to
being by making itself be For-itself, and it ceases to be
presence by ceasing to be for-itself. The For-itself is defined
as presence to being.
To what being - does the For-itself make itself presence?
The answer is clear: the For-itself is presence to all of being-
in-itself. Or rather the presence of the For-itself is what
makes being-in-itself exist as a totality. For by this very mode
of presence to being qua being, every possibility is removed
whereby the For-itself might be more present to one
privileged being than to all other beings. Even though the
facticity of its existence causes it to be there rather than else-
where, being there is not the same as being present. Being
there determines only the perspective by which presence to the
totality of the in-itself is realized. By means of the there the
For-itself causes beings to be for one and the same presence.
Beings are revealed as co-present in a world where the For-it-
self unites them with its own blood by that total ekstatic sac-
rifice of the self which is called presence. “Before” the sacrifice
of the For-itself it would have been impossible to say
that beings existed either together or separated. But the For-
itself is the being by which the present enters into the world;
the beings of the world are co-present, in fact, just in so far
as one and the same for-itself is at the same time present to all
of them. Thus for the in-itselfs what we ordinarily call Present
is sharply distinguished from their being although it is
nothing more than their being. For their Present means only
their co-presence in so far as a For-itself is present to them.
_ We know now what is present and to what the present
IS present. But what is presence?
We have seen that this can not be the pure co-existence
of two existents, conceived as a simple relation of exteriority,
or that would require a third term to establish the co-exis-
tence. ’niis third term exists in the case of the co-existence of
logs in the midst of the world; it is the For-itself which
establishes this co-existence by making itself co-present to all.
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
178
\
But in the case of the Presence of the For-itself to being-in-
itself, there can not be a third term. No witness — ^not even
God — could establish that presence; even the For-itself can
know it only if the presence already is. Nevertheless presence
can not be in the mode of the in-itself. This means that orig-
inally the For-itself is presence to being in so far as the
For-itself is to itself its ovm witness of co-existence. How are
we to understand this? We know that the For-itself is the
being which exists in the form of a witness of its being. Now
the For-itself is present to being if it is intentionally di-
rected outside itself upon that being. And it must adhere
to being as closely as is possible without identification.
This adherence, as we shall see in the next chapter, is realis-
tic, due to the fact that the For-itself realizes its birth in an
original bond with being; it is a witness to itself of itself as
not being that being. Due to this fact it is outside that being,
upon being and within being as not being that being.
In addition we can deduce the following conclusions as to
Ae meaning of Presence: Presence to a being implies that one
is bound to that being by an internal bond; otherwise no
connection between Present and being would be possible. But
this internal bond is a negative bond and denies, as related
to the present being, that one is the being to which one is
present. If this were not so, the internal bond would dissolve
into pure and simple identification. Thus the For-itselTs Pres-
ence to being implies that the For-itself is a witness of itself
in the presence of being as not being that being; presence to
being is the presence of the For-itself in so far as the For-itself
is not. For the negation rests not on a difference in mode of
being which would distinguish the For-itself from being but
on a difference of being. This can be expressed briefly by
saying that the Present is not.
^^at is meant by this non-being of the Present and of
the^ For-itself? To grasp this we must return to the For-itself,
to its mode of existing, and outline briefly a description of its
ontological relation to being. Concerning the For-itself as
sue we should never say, “It is,“ in the sense that we say, for
examp e, t is nine o clock”; that is, in the sense of the total
j itself which posits and suppresses
external aspect of passivity. For
a existence of an appearance coupled with
ss o a reflection which refers to a reflecting without
TEMPORALITY
179
there being any object of which the reflection would be the
reflection. The For-itself does not have being because its
being is always at a distance: its being is there in the reflect-
ing, if you consider appearance, which is appearance or re-
flection only for the reflecting; it is there in the reflection if
you consider the reflecting, which is no longer in itself any-
thing more than a pure function of reflecting this reflection.
Furthermore in itself the For-itself is not being, for it makes
itself be explicitly for-itself as not being being. It is conscious-
ness of as the internal negation of . The struc-
ture at the basis of intentionality and of selfness is the negation,
which is the internal relation of the For-itself to the thing.
The For-itself constitutes itself outside in terms of the thing
as the negation of that thing; thus its first relation with
being-in-itself in negation. It “is” in the mode of the For-
itself; that is, as a separated existent inasmuch as it reveals
itself as not being being. It doubly escapes being, by an in-
ternal disintegration and by express negation. The present is
precisely this negation of being, this escape from being inas-
much as being is there as that from which one escapes. The
For-itself is present to being in the form of flight; the Pres-
ent is a perpetual flight in the face of being. Thus we have
precisely defined the fundamental meaning of the Present:
the Present is not. The present instant emanates from a realis-
tic and reifying conception of the For-itself; it is this concep-
tion which leads us to denote the For-itself according to the
mode of that which is and that to which it is present — ^for ex-
ample, of that hand on the face of the clock. In this sense
it would be absurd to say that it is nine o’clock for the For-
itself, but the For-itself can be present to a hand pointed at
nine o’clock. What we falsely call the Present is the being to
which the present is presence. It is impossible to grasp the
Present in the form of an instant, for the instant would be
the moment when the present is. But the present is not; it
makes itself present in the form of flight.
But the present is not only the For-itself s non-being mak-
ing itself present. As For-itself it has its being outside of it,
before and behind. Behind, it was its past; and before, it will
be its future. It is a flight outside of co-present being and
from the being which it was toward the being which it will
be. At present it is not what it is (past) and it is what it
is not (future) . Here then we are referred to the Future.
180
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
C. The Future
Let us note first that the in-itself can neither be future nor
contain a part of the future. The full moon is future only
when I regard this crescent moon as “in the world” which is
revealed to human reality: it is only by human reality that the
Future arrives in the world. In itself Ais quarter of the moon
is what it is. Nothing in it is potentiality. It is actuality. The
future, like the past, does not exist as a phenomenon of that
original temporality of being-in-itself. The future of the in-
itself, if it existed, would exist in-itself, cut off from being —
like the past. Even if we should admit with Laplace a total
determinism which allowed us to foresee a future state, still it
would be necessary that this future circumstance be outlined
on a preliminary revelation of the future as such, on a being-
to-come of the world — or else time is an illusion and chro-
nology disguises a strictly logical order of deducibility. If the
future is pre-outlined on the horizon of the world, this can be
only by a being which is its own future; that is, which is to-
come for itself, whose being is constituted by a coming-to-
itself of its own being. Here again we discover ekstatic struc-
tures analogous to those which we have described for the
Past. Only a being which has to be its being instead of simply
being it can have a future.
But what exactly is meant by “being its future”? And
what type of being does the future possess? We must abandon
at the start the idea that the future exists as representation.^
m the first place the future is seldom “represented.” When it
is, then as Heidegger says, it is thematized and ceases to be
my future m order to become the indifferent object of my
representation. Finally, if it were represented,. it could not be
the content” of my representation, for content, if there were
any, would have to be present. Someone may say that this
Resent content will be animated by a “futurizing” intention.
pith j sense. Even if that intention existed,
either it would itself of necessity be present-^and then the
° ® future is not capable of any solution; or else
thp transcends the present in the future, and then
rerno ■ ^ ° ^ Mtention is to-come, and it is necessary to
nerrfrrv ^ different from the simple
^ For-itself were limited within its
ir. i.e., in the imagination.
TEMPORALITY
181
present, how could it represent the future to itself? How
could it have either knowledge of it or presentiment? No
fabricated idea could furnish an equivalent for it. Once we
have confined the Present to the Present, it is evident that we
will never get out of it. It would be of no use to describe
the Present as “pregnant with the future.” Either this expres-
sion means nothing, or it denotes an actual eflBcacy in the
present, or it indicates the law of being of the For-itself as
that which is its future to itself — and in this last case it only
points out what must be described and explained. The For-
itself can not be “pregnant with the future” nor “expectant
of the future,” nor can it be “a knowledge of the future” ex-
cept on the basis of an original and prejudicative relation
of itself to itself. We can not conceive for the For-itself the
sfightest possibility of a thematic foresight, not even that of
determined states in a scientific universe, unless it is the
being which comes to itself in terms of the future, the being
which makes itself exist as having its being outside itself in
the future.
Let us take a - simple example. This position which I
quickly assume on the tennis court has meaning only through
the movement which I shall make immediately afterward with
my racket in order to return the ball over the net. But I am
not obeying the “clear representation” of the future motion
nor the “firm will” to accomplish it. Representations and
volitions are idols invented by the psychologists. It is the
future motion which, without even being thematically
posited, hovers in the background of the positions which I -
adopt, so as to clarify them, to link them, and to modify
them. At one throw, as I am there on the court and returning
the ball, I exist first as a lack to myself, and the intermediary
positions which I adopt are only ways of uniting myself with
that future state so as to merge with it; each position has
meaning only through that future state. There is in my con-
sciousness no moment which is not similarly defined by an
internal relation to a future; when I .write, when I smoke,
when I drink, when I rest, the meaning of my conscious
states is always at a distance, down there, outside. In this
sense Heidegger is right in saying that the Dasein is
“always infinitely more than it woidd be if we limited it to its
pure present.” Better yet, this limitation would be impossible,
for we would then be making the Present into an In-itself.
Thus finality is rightly said to be causality reversed--that Js,
182 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the efficacy of the future state. But too often people have for-
gotten to take this formula literally.
We must not understand by the future a “now” which is
not yet. If we did so, we should fall back into the in-itself,
and even worse we should have to envisage time as a given
and static container. The future is what I have to be in so
far as I can not be it. Let us recall that the For-itself makes
itself present before being as not being this being and as
having been its own being in the past This presence is flight
We are not dealing here with a belated presence at rest near
being but with an escape outside of being toward
And this flight is twofold, for in fleeing the being which it
is not, Presence flees the being which it was. Toward what is
it fleeing? We must not forget that in so far as it makes itself
present to being in order to flee it the For-itself is a lack.
The possible is that which the For-itself lacks in order to be
itself or, if you prefer, the appearance of what 1 am — at a
distance. Thus we grasp the meaning of the flight which is
Presence; it is a flight toward its being; that is, toward the
self which it will be by coincidence with what it lacks. The
Future is the lack which wrenches it as lack away from
the in-itself of Presence. If Presence did not lack anything, it
would fall back into being and would lose presence to being
and acquire in exchange the isolation of complete identity. It
is lack as such which permits it to be presence. Because Pres-
ence is outside of itself toward something lacking which is
bey^ond the world, it can be outside itself as presence to an
in-itself which it is not.
The Future is the determining being which the For-itself
has to be beyond being. There is a Future because the For-
itself has to be its being instead of simply being it. This
being which the For-itself has to be can not be in the mode of
the co-present in-itselfs; for in that case it would be without
being made-to-be; we could not then imagine it as a completely
defined state to which presence alone would be lacking,
as Kant says that existence adds nothing more to the ob-
ject of the concept. But this being would no longer be able
to exist, for in that case the For-itself would be only a given.
This being is because the For-itself makes itself be by per-
petually apprehending itself for itself as unachieved in relation
to it. It is this which at a distance haunts the dyad reflection-
reflecting and which causes the reflection to be apprehended
by the reflecting (and conversely) as a Not-yet. But it is
TEMPORALITY
183
necessary that this lacking be given in the unity of a single
upsurge with the For-itself which lacks; otherwise there would
be nothing in relation to which the For-itself might appre-
hend itself as not-yet The Future is revealed to the For-itself
as that which the For-itself is not yet, inasmuch as the For-
itself constitutes itself non-thetically for itself as a not-yet in
the perspective of this revelation, and inasmuch as it makes
itself be as a project of itself outside the Present toward that
which it is not yet. To be sure, the Future can not be without
this revelation. This revelation itself requires being revealed
to itself; that is, it requires the revelation of the For-itself to
itself, for otherwise the ensemble revelation-revealed would
fall into the unconscious — i.e., into the In-itself. Thus only a
being which is its own revealed to itself — ^that is, whose
being is in question for itself — can have a Future. But
conversely such a being can be for itself only in the perspective
of a Not-yet, for it apprehends itself as a nothingness — ^that
is, as a being whose complement of being is at a distance
from itself. At a distance means beyond being. Thus every--
thing which the For-itself is beyond being is the Future.
What is the meaning of this “beyond”? In order to
understand it we must note that the Future has one essentid
characteristic of the For-itself: it is presence (future) to
being. And it is Presence of this particular For-itself, of the
For-itself for which it is the future. When I say, ‘7 shall
be happy,” it is this present For-itself which will be happy;
it is the actual Erlebnis with all' which it was and which
it drags behind it. It will be happy as presence to being;
that is, as future Presence of the For-itself to a co-future
being. So that what has been given me as the meaning of the
present For-itself is ordinarily the co-future being in so far as
it will be revealed to the future For-itself as that to which this
For-itself will be present. For the For-itself is the thetic con-
sciousness of the world in the form of presence and non-thetic
self-consciousness. Thus what is ordinarily revealed to con-
sciousness is the future world without consciousness’ being
aware that it is the world in so far as it will appear to a con-
sciousness, the world in so far as it is posited as future by the
presence of a For-itself to come. This world has meaning as
future only in so far as I am present to it as another who I
be, in another position, physical, emotional, social, etc.
^et it is this which is at the end of my present For-itself and
beyond being-in-itself, and this is the reason why we have a
184 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
tendency first to present the future as a state of the world and
to make it appear subsequently on the ground of the world.
~ If I write, I am conscious of the words as written and as about
to be written. The words alone seem to be the future which
awaits me. But the very fact that they appear as to be written
implies that writing, as a non-thetic self-consciousness, is
the possibility which I am. Thus the Future as the future pres-
ence of a For-itself to a being drags being-in -itself along
with it into the future. This being to which the For-itself
will be present is the meaning of the in-itsclf co-present with
the present For-itself, as the future is the meaning of the
For-itself. The Future is presence to a co-future being because
the For-itself can exist only outside itself at the side of being
and because the future is a future For-itself. But thus through
the Future a particular future arrives in the World; that is,
the For-itself is its meaning as Presence to being which
is beyond being. Through the For-itself, a Beyond of being
is revealed next to which the For-itself has to be what it is.
As the saying goes, “I must become what I was”; but I must
become what I was — in a world that has become and in a
world that has become from the standpoint of what it is. This
means that I give to the world its own possibilities in terms
of the state which I apprehend on it. Determinism appears on
the ground of the futurizing project of myself. Thus the future
will be distinguished from the imaginary, where similarly I
am what I am not, where similarly I find my meaning in a
being which 1 have to be but where this For-itself which I
have to be emerges on the ground of the nihilation of the
world, apart from the world of being.
But the Future is not solely the presence of the For-itself
to a being situated beyond being. It is something which waits
for the For-itself which I am. This something is myself.
When I say that I will be happy, we understand that it is the
present “I,” dragging its Past after it, who will be happy. Thus
the Future is “I” inasmuch as I await myself as presence to a
being beyond being. I project myself toward the Future in
order to merge there with that which I lack; that is, with that
which if synthetically added to my Present would make me be
what I am. Thus what the For-itself has to be as presence to
being beyond being is its own possibility. The Future is the
ideal point where the sudden infinite compression of factic-
ity (Past), of the For-itself (Present), and of its possible (a
particular Future) will at last cause the Self to arise as the
TEMPORALITY
185
existence in-itself of the For-itself. The project of the For-
itself toward the future which it w is a project toward the
In-itself. In this sense the For-itself has to be its future be-
cause it can be the foundation of what it is only before itself
and beyond being. It is the very nature of the For-itself that
it must be “an always future hollow.” For this reason it will
never have become, in the Present, what it had to be, in the
Future. The entire future of the present For-itself falls into
the Past as the future along with this For-itself itself. It will
be the past future of a particular For-itself or a former future.
This future is not realized. What is realized is a For-itself
which is designated by the Future and which is constituted in
connection with this future. For example, my final position on
the tennis court has determined on the ground of the future all
my intermediary positions, and finally it has been reunited
with an ultimate position identical with what it was in the
. future as the meaning of my movements- But, precisely, this
“reuniting” is purely ideal; it is not really operative. The
future does not allow itself to be rejoined; it slides into the
Past as a bygone future, and the Present For-itself in all its
facticity is revealed as the foundation of its own nothingness
and once again as the lack of a new future. Hence comes that
ontological disillusion which awaits the For-itself at each
emergence into the future. “Under the Empire how beautiful
was the Republic!” Even if my present is strictly identical in
its content with the future toward which I projected myself
beyond being, it is not this present toward which 1
was projecting myself; for I was projecting myself toward the
future qua future — that is, as the point of the reuniting of my
being, as the place of the upsurge of the Self.
Now we are better able to raise the question of the being
of the Future since this Future which I have to be is simply
my possibility of presence to being beyond being. In this sense
the Future is strictly opposed to the Past. The Past is, to be
. sure, the being which I am outside of myself, but it is the
being which I am without the possibility of not being it. This
is what we have defined as being its past behind itself. The
being of the Future which I have to be, on the contrary, is
such that I can only be it; for my freedom gnaws at its being
from below. This means that the Future constitutes the mean-
ing of my present For-itself, as the project of its possibility,
but that it in no way predetermines my For-itself which is to-
come, since the For-itself is always abandoned to the nihilat-
186 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ing obligation of being the foundation of its nothingness. The
Future can only effect a pre-outline of the limits within which
the For-itself will make itself be as a flight making itself pres-
ent to being in the direction of another future. The future is
what I would be if I were not free and what I can have to
be only because I am free. It appears on the horizon to an-
nounce to me what I am from the standpoint of what I shall
be. (“What are you doing? I am in the process of tacking up
this tapestry, of hanging this picture on the wall.”) Yet at
the same time by its nature as a future present-for-itself, it is
disarmed; for the For-itself which will-be, will be in the mode
of determining itself to be, and the Future, then become a
past future as a pre-outline of this for-itself, will be able only
as the past to influence it to be what it makes itself be. In
a word, I am my Future in the constant perspective of the
possibility of not being it. Hence that anguish which we
have described above which springs from the fact that I am
not sufficiently that Future which I have to be and which
gives its meaning to my present: it is because I am a being
whose meaning is always problematic. In vain would the For-
itself long to be enchained to its Possibility, as to the being
which it is outside itself but which it is surely outside itself.
The For-itself can never be its Future except problematically,
for it is separated from it by a Nothingness which it is. In
short the For-itself is free, and its Freedom is to itself its
own limit To be free is to be condemned to be free. Thus the
Future qua Future does not have to be. It is not in itself, and
neither is it in the mode of being of the For-itself since it is
the meaning of the For-itself. The Future is not, it is possi-
bilized.
The Future is the continual possibilization of possibles —
^ the meaning of the present For-itself in so far as this mean-
ing is problematic and as such radically escapes the present
For-itself.
The Future thus defined does not correspond to a homo-
geneous and chronologically ordered succession of moments to
come.^ To be sure, there is a hierarchy of my possibles. But
mis hierarchy does not correspond to the order of universal
Temporality such as will be established on the bases of orig-
inal Temporality. I am an infinity of possibilities, for the
meaning of the For-itself is complex and can not be contained
in one formula. But a particular possibility may be more deter-
minant for the meaning of the present For-itself than another
TEMPORALITY
187
which is nearer in universal time. For example, the possi-
bility of going at two o’clock to see a friend whom I have not
seen for two years — ^this is truly a possible which I am. But
the nearer possibilities — ^the possibilities of going there in a
taxi, by bus, by subway, on foot — all these at present remain
undetermined. I am not any one of these possibilities. Also
there are gaps in the series of my possibilities. In the order
of knowledge the gaps will be filled by the constitution of an
homogeneous time without lacuna; in the order of action they
win be filled by the will — that is, by rational, thematizing
choice in terras of my possibles, and of possibilities which are
not and will never be my possibilities and which I will realize
in the mode of total indifference in order to be reunited with
a possible which I am.
n. THE ONTOLOGY OF TEMPORALITY
A. Static Temporality
Our phenomenological description of the three temporal
ekstases should enable us at present to approach temporality
as a total structure organizing within it secondary ekstatic
structures. But this new study must be made from two differ-
ent points of view.
Temporality is often considered as an indefinable. Every-
body admits however that it is before all else a succession.
And succession in turn can be defined as an order in which
the ordering principle is the relation before-after. A multiplic-
ity ordered in terms of before and after is a temporal mul-
tiplicity. It is appropriate therefore to begin by considering
the constitution and the requirements of the terms before and
after. This is what we shall call the static temporal since these
notions of before and after can be considered in a strictly
ordinal arrangement independent of change proper. But time
is not only a fixed order for a determined multiplicity; ob-
serving temporality more closely we establish the fact of suc-
cession; that is, the fact that a particular after becomes a
before, that the Present becomes past and the future a former-
future. This may well be the subject of our second investi-
gation under the name of the dynamic temporal. It is of course
in the dynamic temporal that we will have to look for the
secret of the static constitution of time. But it is preferable
to divide up the difficulties. Indeed in a sense we can say that
188 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the static temporal can be considered separately as a certain
formal structure of temporality — ^what Kant calls the order of
time — and that the dynamic corresponds to the material
flow or — ^using Kantian terminology — ^to the course of time.
It will be to our advantage therefore to consider separately
first this order and then this course.
The order “before-after” is defined first of all by irrevers-
ibility. We call such a series successive when we can consider
the terms only one at a time and only in one direction. But
precisely because the terms of the series are revealed one at a
time and because each is exclusive of the others, some people
have wanted to see in the before and the after forms of separa-
tion. Actually time does separate me, for example, from the
realization of my desires. If I am obliged to wait for that
realization, it is because it is located after other events. With-
out the succession of the “after,” I would be immediately
what I wish to be; there would no longer be any distance
between the present me and the later me, not any separation
between dream and action. Novelists and poets have insisted
on time’s power to separate, and they have emphasized like-
wise an accompanying idea, which however springs from the
dynamic temporal — ^that every “now” is destined to become a
“formerly.” Time gnaws and wears away; it separates; it flies.
And by virtue of separation — ^by separating man from his
pain or from the object of his pain — ^time cures.
“Let time do it,” said the King to Don Roderigo, In gen-
eral people have been struck with the necessity for all being
to be divided up into an infinite dispersion of afters which
succeed each other. Even the permanents, even this table,
which remains invariable while I change, must spread out and
refract its being in the temporal dispersion. Time separates
me from myself, from what I have been, from what I wish to
be, from what I wish to do, from things, and from others. It
is time which is chosen as the practical measure of distance;
this town is half an hour away, that one an hour; it will take
three days to finish this work, etc. It results from these prem-
ises that^ a temporal vision of the world and of man will
dissolve into a crumbling of befores and afters. The unity of
this crumbling, the temporal atom, will be the instant, which
has its place before certain determined instants and after other
instantswithout admitting either before or after inside its own
orm. The instant is indivisible and non-temporal since tem-
pera ity is succession, but the world dissolves into an infinite
TEMPORALITY
189
dust of instants. And it is a problem for Descartes, for ex-
ample, to learn how there can be a passage f’-rim one instant to
another instant; for the instants are juxtaposed — ue., separated
by nothing and yet without communication. Similarly Proust
asks how his' Self can pass from one instant to another; how,
for example, he discovers after a night’s sleep precisely the
Self of the day before rather than some other one. More rad-
ically, the empiricists after having denied the permanence of
the Self try in vain to establish a semblance of transversal unity
across the instants of psychic life. Thus when we consider in
isolation the dissolving power of temporality, we are forced to
admit that the act of having existed at a given instant does not
constitute a right to exist at the following instant, not even a
mortgage or- option on the future. The problem is then to
explain how there is a world — Le., connected changes and
permanences in time.
Yet temporality is not solely nor even primarily separa-
tion. We can account for this by considering more precisely
the notion of before and after. A, let us say, is after B. Now
we have established an express relation of order between A
arid B which supposes therefore their unification at the heart
of this very order. Even if there had been no other relation
between A and B than this, it would still be sufficient to assure
their connection, for it would allow thought to go from one to
the other and to unite them in a judgment of succession. If,
then, time is separation, it is at least a separation of a special
type — a division which reunites. So far so good, somebody will
say, but this unifying relation is pre-eminently an external re-
lation. When the Association School wanted to establish that
the mind’s impressions were held together only by purely ex-
ternal bonds, did they not finally reduce all associative con-
nections to the relation of tjefore-after, conceived as simple
“contiguity”?
Of course. But has not Kant shown that the unity of ex-
perience and hence the unification of temporal change are
required in order for the slightest bond of empirical associa-
tion to be even conceivable? Let us consider the association
theory more carefully. It is accompanied by a monistic concep-
hon to the effect that being is everywhere being-in-itself. Each
impression on the mind is in itself what it is; it is isolated in
Its present plenitude and does not allow any trace of the
future or any lack. Hume, when he issued his famous chal-
enge, was concerned with establishing this law, which he
190 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
claimed to derive from experience; one can at wm exai^e
any impression, strong or weak; one will never
in it but itself so that any connection with an^tecedent or a
consequent, no matter how constant it may be, remams un-
“"^St^^^suppose a temporal content A existing as a being
in-itself and a temporal content B, posterior to the first and
existing in the same mode— that is, in &e self-mclusion o
identity. It should be remarked first that tins self-identity
obliges them to exist each without any separation from itselt,
without even a temporal separation, whether in etermty or m
the instant — and eternity and the instant are here equivalent
since the instant, not being defined internally in connec-
tion with before-after, is non-temporal. One may ask how
under these circumstances the state A can be prior to the state
B. It would be of no use to reply that it is not which
are prior or post but the instants which contain them, for on
this theory the instants are in-itselfs, like the states. But the
priority of A over B supposes in the very nature of A (instant
or state) an incompleteness which points toward B. If A is
prior to B, then A receives this determination in B. Othenvise
neither the upsurge nor the annihilation of B isolated in its
instant can confer on A isolated in its instant the slightest
particular quality. In a word, if A is to be prior to B, it must
be, in its very being, in B as A’s future. Conversely, B, if it
is to be posterior to A, must linger behind itself in A, which
will confer on B its sense of posteriority. If then we grant
a priori being in-itself to A and to B, it is impossible to es-
tablish between them the slightest connection of succession.
That connection in fact would be a purely external relation
and as such would necessarily hang in midair, deprived of
any substratum, without power to get any hold on either A
or B — in a sort of non-temporal nothingness.
There remains the possibility that this relation before-after
can exist only for a witness who establishes it. The difficulty is
that if this witness can be simultaneously in A and in B, it is
because he is himself temporal, and the problem will be raised
anew for him. Or rather, on the contrary, he can transcend
time by a gift of temporal ubiquity which is equivalent to non-
temporality. This is the solution at which both Descartes and
Kant stopped. For them temporal unity, at the heart of which
is revealed the synthetic relation before-after, is conferred on
the multiplicity of instants by a being who himself escapes
TEMPORALITY
191
temporality. Both of them start from the presupposition of a
time which would be a form of division and which itself
dissolves in pure multiplicity. Since the unity of time can
not be furnished by time itself, both philosophers put an
extra-temporal being in charge of it: God and his continuous
creation with Descartes, the “I think” {Ich denke) and its
forms of synthetic unity with Kant. For Descartes, time is
unified by its material content, which is maintained in exis-
tence by a perpetual creation ex nihilo; for Kant, on the other
hand, the concepts of pure understanding apply to the very
form of time. In both cases it is a non-temporal (God or the
“I think”) which is charged with providing the non-temporals
(instants) with their temporality. Temporality becomes a
simple external and abstract relation between non-temporal
substances; there is an attempt to reconstruct it entirely with
atemporal materials.
It is evident that such-- a reconstruction, made first in
opposition to time, can not later lead to the temporal. Either
we will implicitly and surreptitiously temporalize the non-tem-
poral; or else if we scrupulously preserve its non-temporality,
time will become a pure human illusion, a dream. If time is
real, then even God wiU have' to “wait for the sugar to dis-
solve.” He must be both down there in the future and yes-
terday in the past in order to effect the connection of mo-
ments, for it is necessary that he take hold of them there
where they are. Thus his pseudo non-temporality hides other
concepts — that of temporal infinity and that of temporal ubiq-
uity. But these can have meaning only'for a synthetic form of
withdrawal from self which no longer corresponds to being
in itself. If, on the contrary, we base, for example, the
omniscience of God on his extra-temporality, then he does
not have to wait till the sugar dissolves in order to see that it
will dissolve. But then the necessity of waiting and conse-
quently temporality can represent only an illusion resulting
from human finitude; the chronological order is only the
confused perception of an order which is logical and eternal.
This argument can be applied without any modification to
the Kantian “I think.” It would be of no use to object, as
Kant does, that time has a unity as such since it arises as an
a priori form from the non-temporal; for the problem is not
so much to account for the total unity of its upsurge as for
the intra-temporal connections of before and after.
Someone may speak of a potential temporality which the
192 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
unification causes to become actuality. But this potentid suc-
cession is even less comprehensible than the real succession of
which we spoke earlier. What is a succession which waits for
unification in order to become a succession? To whom or what
does it belong? Yet if it is not already given somewhere, how
could the non-temporal secrete it without thereby losing all
non-temporality; how could the succession even emanate
from the non-temporal without shattering it? Moreover the
very idea of unification is here altogether incomprehensible.
We have in fact supposed two in-itselfs isolated each at its
own place and date. How can we unify them? Are we dealing
with a real unification? In this case either we are merely play-
ing with words — and the unification will have no hold on the
two in-itselfs isolated in their respective self-identity and
completeness; or else it will be necessary to constitute a unity
of a new type — namely, ekstatic unity in which each state
will be outside itself, down there in order to be before or
after the other. But this would necessitate shattering their
being, expanding it, in a word temporalizing it, and would not
merely bring them together. But how will the non-temporal
unity of the “I think” as the simple faculty of thought be capa-
ble of effecting this decompression of being? Shall we say
that the unification is potential; that is, that beyond impres-
sions we have projected a type of unity roughly comparable to
Husserl’s noema? But how will a non-temporal which has to
unite non-temporals conceive a unification of the type of the
succession? And if as will then have to be admitted, the esse
of time is a percipi, how is the percipitur constituted? In a
word, how could a being with a temporal structure apprehend
as temporals (or intend as such) in-itselfs isolated in their
non-temporality? Thus inasmuch as temporality is at once a
form of separation and a form of synthesis, it does not allow
itself either to be derived from a non-temporal or to be im-
posed from without upon non-temporals.
Leibniz in reaction against Descartes, and Bergson in
reaction against Kant have in turn tried to see in temporality
only^ a pure relation of immanence and cohesion. Leibniz
considers that the problem of the passage from one instant to
another and its solution, continuous creation, are a false prob-
lem and a useless solution. According to him Descartes forgot
the continuity of time. By asserting the continuity of
tune, we forbid ourselves to conceive of time in the form of
instants, and if there is no longer an instant, there is no
TEMPORALITY
193
longer any relation of before-after between instants. Time is a
vast continuity of flow to which no original element existing
in-itself may be assigned.
Leibniz has forgotten that before-after is also a form
which separates. If time is a given continuity with an undeni-
able tendency to separate, one can raise Descartes’ question
in another form: what is the origin of the cohesive power of
continuity? Of course there are primary elements juxtaposed
in a continuum. But this is precisely because there is at the
start a unification. It is because I draw a straight line, as Kant
says, that the straight line, realized in the unity of a single act,
is something other than an infinite series of points. Who
then draws time? In short this continuity is a fact which
must be accounted for. It cannot be a solution. We may recall
here the famous definition of Poincare; a series a, b, c is con-
tinuous when we can write a=b, b=c, a-^c. This definition is
excellent in that it gives us a foreshadowing of a type of being
which is 'what it is not and which is not what it is: by virtue
of the axiom, a—c; by virtue of continuity itself, a-hc.
Thus a is and is not equivalent to c. And b, equal to a and
equal to c, is different from itself inasmuch as a is not equal
to c. But this ingenious definition rests on a mere playing with
words such as we confronted in the view of the in-itself. And
while it furnishes us vfith a type of being which at the same
time is and is not, it does not furnish us with either its princi-
ples or its foundation. Everything still remains to be done. In
the study of temporality in particular, we realize well what
service continuity can render us by putting in between the
instant a and the instant c, no matter how close together they
are, an intermediary b, such that, according to the formula
a=b, bz=:c, a-^c, in this case b is at once indistinguishable
from a and indistinguishable from c, which are perfectly dis-
tinct one from the other. It is b which will realize the relation
before-after, it is b which will be before itself inasmuch as it is
indistinguishable from a and from c. All very good! But how
can such a being exist? Whence comes its ekstatic nature?
How does it happen that the division which is outlined in it is
not achieved? "V^y does it not explode into two terms, one of
which would dissolve into a and the other in c? How can we
^il to see that there is here a problem concerning its unity?
.®f^nps a deeper examination of the conditions of the possi-
bilities of this being would have shown us that only the For-
itself could thus exist in the ekstatic unity of self. But this
194 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
examination has not been attempted, and temporal cohesion,
with Leibniz, hides after all the cohesion through absolute
immanence of logic— i.e., identity. But if the chronological
order is continuous, it could not “symbolize” with the order
of identity, for the continuous is not compatible with the
identical.
Similarly Bergson with his duration, which is a melodic
organization and multiplicity of interpenetration, does not
appear to see that an organization of multiplicity presupposes
an organizing act. He is right in contrast to Descartes when he
suppresses the instant; but Kant was right rather than Berg-
son in claiming that there is no given synthesis. This Past of
Bergson’s which clings to the present and even penetrates it
is scarcely more than a rhetorical figure. It shows well the
difficulties which Bergson encountered in his theory of mem-
ory. For if the Past, as he maintains, is inactive, it can only re-
main behind and will never come to penetrate the present in
the form of memory unless a present being has undertaken to
exist as well ekstatically in the Past. Of course, with Bergson,
it is indeed one and the same being which endures. But that
makes one realize aU the more the need for ontological elu-
cidations. For we do not know finally if it is the being which
endures or if it is duration which is being. And if duration is
being, then Bergson must tell us what is the ontological struc-
ture of duration; and if, on the contrary, it is being which
endures, he must show us what it is in being which permits it
to endure.
What can we conclude as the result of this discussion?
First of all this: temporality is a dissolving force but it is at
the^ center of a unifying act; it is less a real multiplicity —
which could not subsequently receive any unity and which
consequently would not even exist as a multiplicity — ^than a
quasi-multiplicity, a foreshadowing of dissociation in the heart
of umty. We need not try to consider either one of these two
aspects separately. If we first posit temporal unity,, we risk no
longer being able to understand anything about irreversible
succession as the meaning of this unity, and if we consider the
dismtegrating succession as the original character of time, we
nsk no longer being able to understand that there is one time.
If ffien there is no priority of unity over multiplicity, nor of
multiplicity over unity, it is necessary to conceive of temporal-
ity as a unity which multiplies itself; that is, temporality can
ne only a relation of being at the heart of this same being.
TEMPORALITY
195
We can not picture it as a container whose being would be
given, for this would be to renounce forever the hope of
understanding how this being in itself can be broken up into
multiplicity or how the in-itself of the containing minima or
instants can be reunited within the unity of one time. Tem-
porality is not. Only a being of a certain structure of being can
be temporal in the unity of its being. The before and after are
intelligible, as we have observed, only as an internal relation.
It is there in the after that the before causes itself to be de-
termined as before and conversely. In short the before is in-
telligible only if it is the being which is before itself. This
means that temporality can only indicate the mode of being
of a being which is itself outside itself. Temporality must have
the structure of selfness. Indeed it is only because the self in
its being is there outside itself that it can be before or after
itself, that there can be in general any before and after. Tem-
porality exists only as the intra-structure of a being which has
to be its own being; that is, as the intra-structure of a For-it-
self. Not that the For-itself has an ontological priority over
temporality. But Temporality is the being of the For-itself in
so far as the For-itself has to be its being ekstatically. Tem-
porality is not, but the For-itself temporalizes itself by existing.
Conversely our phenomenological study of the Past, the
Present, and the Future allows us to demonstrate that the For-
itself can not be except in temporal form.
Tlie For-itself rising into being as the nihilation of the
In-itself constitutes itself simultaneously in all the possible
dimensions of nihilation. From whatever point of view it is
considered, it is the being which holds to itself by a single
thread, or more precisely it is the being which by being
causes all the possible dimensions of its nihilation to exist.
In the ancient world the profound cohesion and dispersion
of the Jewish people was designated by the term “Diaspora.”
It is this word which will serve to designate the mode of
being of the For-itself; it is diasporatic. Being-in-itself has
only one dimension of being, but the appearance of nothing-
ness as that which is made-to-be at the heart of being compli-
cates the existential structure by causing the appearance of the
ontological mirage of the Self. We shall see later that reflec-
tion, transcendence, being-in-the-world, and being-for-others
represent several dimensions of nihilation or, if you prefer,
several original relations of being with the self. Thus nothing-
ness introduces quasi-multiplicity into the heart of being. This
196 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
quasi-multiplicity is tlic foundation of all inlra-mundanc
multiplicities, for a multiplicity supposes an original unity at
the heart of which the multiplicity is omlinccl. In this sense
it is not true, as Meyerson claims, that the <iivc^^c creates a
scandal and that the responsibility for ihk scandal rests with
the real. The in-itsclf is not diversity; it is not multiplicity;
and in order for it to receive multiplicity ns the chtsractcristic
of itsbeing-in-thc-midsi-of-thC'World. a bcinn, must ruisc svhich
is simultaneously present to each in-itsclf isolated in its own
identity. It is through human rc.ality that multiplicity cotnes
into the world; it is the quasi-multiplicity at the heart of
bcing-for-itsclf which causes number to he revealed in the
world.
But what is the meaning of these multiple dimensions or
quasi-mulliplcs of the For-itsclf? They arc various relations
to its being. Wlien something simply is what it is, it has only
one way of being its being. But the moment that something is
no longer its being, then various ways of being it while not
being it arise simultaneously. Tlic For-it.sclf — if we .stick to the
primary ckstascs (those which both indicate the origin:',! mean-
ing of the nihilaiion and represent the Ircsi nihilntinn) — can
and must at the same lime fulfill these three require-
ments: (I) to not-bc what it is, (2) to be what it is not, (3)
to be what it is not and to not-bc what it is — within the unity
of a perpetual referring. Here we arc dealing wiih i}\rce ckstai-
ic dimensions; the meaning of the ckstasis is distance from
self. It is impo.ssiblc to conceive of a consciousness v>hich
would not c.xist in these three dimensions. And if Ujc copio
discovers one of them first, that does not mean that this di-
mension is first but only that it is most ctxsily disclosed. But
by itself alone it is unsclbstartfit^ and it immediately allows the
other dimensions to be seen. Tlic For-itself is a being w'hich
must simultaneously exist in all its dimensions. Here distance,
conceived as distance from the self, is nothing real, nothing
which is in a general way as in-ilself; it is simply the nothing,
the nothingness which “is made-to-be” as separation. Each
dimension is the For-itscifs way of projecting itself vainly
toward the Self, of being what it is beyond a nothingness, a
different way of being this fall of being, this frustration of
being which the For-itself has to be. Let us consider these
dimensions one by one.
In the first dimension the For-itself has to be its being,
ehmd itself, as that which it is w’ithout being the foundation
TEMPORALITY
197
/
of it. Its being is there, opposite it, but a nothingness separates
it from its being, the nothingness of facticity. The For-itself
as the foundation of its nothingness — and as such necessary
— is separated from its original contingency in that it can
neither get rid of it nor merge with it. It is for itself but in
the mode of the irremediable and the gratuitous. Its being is
for it, for it is not for this being, because such a reciprocity of
reflection-reflecting would cause the original contingency of
what is to disappear. Precisely because the For-itself appre-
hends itself in the form of being, it is at a distance — ^like a
game of reflection-reflecting which slips into the in-itself and
m which it is no longer the reflection which makes the reflect-
ing exist nor the reflecting which makes the reflection exist.
This being, because of the very fact that the For-itself has to
be it, gives itself as something which is irretrievable precisely
because the For-itself can not found it in the mode reflection-
reflecting but only as it founds the connection between this
being and itself. The For-itself does not found the being of
this being but only the fact that this being can be given.
We are dealing here with an unconditional necessity:
whatever the For-itself under consideration may be, it is in one
certain sense; it is since it can be named, since certain charac-
teristics may be affirmed or denied concerning it. But in so
'far as it is For-itself, it is never what it is. What it is is
behind it as the perpetual surpassed. It is precisely this sur-
passed facticity which we call the Past. The Past then is a
necessary structure of the For-itself; for the For-itself can
exist only as a nihilating surpassing, and this surpassing im-
plies something surpassed. Consequently it is impossible at
any particular moment when we consider a For-itself, to appre-
hend it as nbt-yet-having a Past. We need not believe that the
For-itself exists &st and arises in the world in the absolute
newness of a being without a past and that it then gradually
constitutes a past for itself. But whatever may be the circum-
stances under which the For-itself arises in the world, it comes
to the world in the ekstatic unity of a relation with its Past;
there is no absolute beginning which without ever having a
past would become past. Since the For-itself qua For-itself
has to be its past, it comes into_the world with a Past.
^ These few remarks may permit us to view in a somewhat
different light the problem of birth. Actually it seems shock-
ing that consciousness “appears” at a certain moment, that it
comes “to inhabit” the embryo, in short that there is a mo-
198 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ment when the living being in formation is without conscious-
ness and a moment when a consciousness without a past is
suddenly imprisoned in it. But the shock will cease if it ap-
pears that there can be no consciousness without a past. This
does not mean, diowever, that every consciousness supposes a
prior consciousness fixed in the In-itself. The relation of the
present For-itself to the For-itself become In-itself hidesTrom
us the primitive relation of Fastness, which is a relation be-
tween the For-itself and the pure In-itself. In fact it is as the
nihilation of the In-itself that the For-itself arises in the world,
and it is by this absolute event that the Past as such is con-
stituted as the original, nihilating relation between the For-
itself and the In-itself. What originally constitutes the being of
the For-itself is this relation to a being which is not conscious-
ness, which exists in the total night of identity, and which the
For-itself is nevertheless obliged to be, outside and behind it-
self. The For-itself, which can in no case be reduced to this
being, represents an absolute newness in relation to it, but the
For-itself feels a profound solidarity of being with it and in-
dicates this by the word before. The In-itself is what the For-
itself was before. In this sense we can easily conceive that our
past appears to us bounded by a fine, smooth wire, which
would become actual if consciousness could spring up in the
world before having a past, but which, on the contrary, is lost
in a progressive obscuration back to that darkness which is
nevertheless still ourselves. We can conceive of the ontological
meaning of this shocking solidarity with the foetus, a solidar-
ity which we neither deny nor understand. For finally this
foetus was me; it represents the factual limit for my mem-
ory but not the theoretical limit of my past.
There is a metaphysical problem concerning birth in that
I can be anxious to know how I happen to have been bom
from that particular embryo; and this problem is perhaps in-
soluble. But it is not an ontological problem; we do not have
to^ ask why there can be a birth of consciousness, for con-
sciousness can appear to itself only as a nihilation of in-itself
— f.e., as being already born. Birth as an ekstatic relation of
eing to the In-itself which it is not and as the a priori con-
stitution of pastness is a law of being for the For-itself. To
e For-itself is to he born. But one should not next raise
met^hysical questions concerning the In-itself from which
T bom, questions such as: “How was there an
in-itself before the birth of the For-itself? How was the For-'
TEMPORALITY
199
itself born from this In-itself rather than from another?” Etc.
All these questions fail to take into account the fact that it is
through the For-itself that the Past in general can exist. If
there is a Before, it is because the For-itself has risen in the
world, and it is from the standpoint of the For-itself that the
past can be established. To the extent that the In-itself is made
co-present with the For-itself, a world appears instead of iso-
lated examples of In-itself. And in this world it is possible to
effect a designation and to say this object, that object. In this
sense, inasmuch as the For-itself in its coming into being
causes a world of co-presences to exist, it causes also the
appearance of its “before” as a co-present to the in-itselfs in a
world or, if you prefer, in a state of the world which has
passed.
Thus in a sense the For-itself appears as being bom from
the world, for the In-itself from which it is born is in the
midst of the world, as a co-present past among co-present
pasts; into the world and in terms of the world a For-itself
arises which did not exist before and which has been bom.
Blit in another sense it is the For-itself which causes the exis-
tence of a before in general and the existence in this before
of co-presents united in the unity of one past world and such
that one can designate one or the other among them as this
object. There is not first _ one universal time where a For-itself
suddenly appears not yet having a Past. Rather it is in terms of
birth as the original and a priori law of being for the For-
itself that there is revealed a world with a universal time in
which we can designate a moment when the For-itself was
not yet arid a moment when it appeared, beings from which
the For-itself was not born and a being from which it was
born. Birth is the upsurge of the absolute relation of Pastness
as the ekstatic being of the For-itself in the In-itself. Through
birth a Past appears in the world. We shall return to this. Here
It is sufficient to note that consciousness or for-itself is a being
which rises to being beyond an unalterable which it is and that
this unalterable, inasmuch as it is behind the For-itself in the
midst of the world, is the Past.
The Past as the unalterable being which I have to be
without any possibility of not being it does_ not enter into the
unity “reflection-reflecting” of the Erlebnis; it is outside. Yet
neither does it exist as that of which there is consciousness in
the sense, for example, that the perceived chair is that of
which there is perceptive consciousness. In the case of the per-
200 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ception of the chair, there is a thesis— that is, the apprehen-
sion and afiarmation of the chair as the in-itself which con-
sciousness is not. What consciousness has to be in the mode of
being of the For-itself is not-being-the-chair. For its “not-
being-the-chair” is, as we shall see, in the form of the con-
sciousness (of) not-beihg (i.e., the appearance of not-being)
for a witness who is there only to bear witness to this not-
being. The negation then is explicit and constitutes the bond
of being between the perceived object and the for-itself. The
For-itself is nothing more than this translucent Nothing
which is the negation of the thing perceived. But although
the Past is outside, the connection here is not of the same type,
for the For-itself gives itself as being the Past Due to this fact
there can not be a thesis of the Past, for one can posit only
what one is not. Thus in the perception of the object the
For-itself acknowledges itself to itself as not being the ob-
ject, while in the unveiling of the Past the For-itself acknowl-
edges itself as being the Past and is separated from it only by
its nature as For-itself, which can be nothing. Thus the Past
is not made a thesis, and yet the Past is not immanent in the
For-itself. It haunts the For-itself at the very moment that
the For-itself acknowledges itself as not being this or that
particular thing. The Past is not the object of the regard of
the For-itself. This translucent regard is directed to itself be-
yond the thing, toward the future. The Past as a thing which
one is without positing it, as that which haunte with-
out being observed, is behind the For-itself, outside the the-
matic field which is before the For-itself as that which it
illuminates. The Past is “posited opposite” the For-itself and
assumed as that which the For-itself has to be without being
able either to affirm or deny .or thematize or absorb it
To be sure, the Past can be the object of a thesis for me,
and indeed it is often thematized. But then it is the object of
an explicit investigation, and in this case the For-itself affirms
itself as not being this Past which it posits. The Past is no
longer behind; it does not cease being past, but I myself
cease to be the Past. In the primary mode I was my Past with-
out knowing it (but by no means not vrithout being conscious
of it) , in the secondary mode I know my past but I no lonser
was it. Someone may ask how I can be conscious of my Past
if it is not in the thetic mode. Yet the Past is there constantly.
It is the very meaning of the object which I look at and which
I have already seen, of the familiar faces which surround me.
TEMPORALITY
201
It is the origin of this movement which presently follows and
which I would not be able to call circular if I were not myself
— ^in the Past — the witness of its beginning. It is the origin
and springboard of all my actions; it is that constantly given
density of the world which allows me to orient myself and to
get my bearings. It is rhyself in so far as I aim at myself as a
person (there is also a structure to-come of the Ego). In
short, the Past is my contingent and gratuitous bond with
the world and with myself inasmuch as I constantly live it
as a total renunciation. The psychologists call it empirical
knowledge (savoir). But in addition to the fact that by this
term they “psychologize” it, they thus remove any method of
accounting for it. For empirical knowledge is ever3rwhere and
conditions everything, even memory; in a word, intellectual
memory presupposes knowledge. And what is their empirical
knowledge — ^if we are to understand by it a present fact —
if it is not an intellectual memory? This supple, insinuating,
changing knowledge which makes the woof of all our thoughts
and which is composed of a thousand empty indications, a
thousand designations which point behind us, without image,
without words, without thesis — ^this is my concrete Past inas-
much as I was it as the unalterable background-depth of all
my thoughts and all my feelings.
In its second dimension of nihilation, the For-itself appre-
hends itself as a certain lack. It is this lack and it is also the
lacking, for it has to be what it is. To drink or to be drinking
means never to have finished drinking, to have still to be
drinking beyond the drinking which I am. And when “I
have finished drinking,” / have drunk; the ensemble slips into
the past. While actually drinking, I am then ibis drinking
which I have to be and which I am not; every designation of
myself if it is to be heavy and full, if it is to have the density
of the self-identical — every such designation escapes me into
fee past. If it reaches me in the Present, it is because it divides
itself into the Not-yet; it is because it designates me as an un-
achieved totality which can not be achieved. This Not-yet is
gnawed by the nihilating freedom of the For-itself. It is not
only being-at-a-distance; it is the whittling down of being. Here
the For-itself, which was in advance of itself in the first
dimension of nihilation, is now behind itself. Before itself,
behind itself; never itself. This is the very meaning of the
^o ekstases Past and Future, and this is why value in itself is
by nature self-repose, non-temporality! The eternity which
202 ' BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
man is seeking is not the infinity of duration, of that vain pur-
suit after the self for which I am myself responsible; man
seeks a repose in self, the atemporality of the absolute coinci-
dence with himself.
Finally, in the third dimension, the For-itself, dispersed
in the perpetual game of reflected-reflecting,^ escapes itself
in the unity of one and the same flight. Here being is every-
where and nowhere: wherever one tries to seize it, it is there
before one, it has escaped. It is this game of musical chairs at
the heart of the For-itself which is Presence to being.®
As Present, Past, Future — all at the same time — ^the For-
itself dispersing its being in three dimensions is temporal due
to the very fact that it nihilates itself. No one of these dimen-
sions has any ontological priority over the other; none of them
can exist without the other two. Yet in spite of all this, it is
best to put the accent on the present ekstasis and not on the
future ekstasis as Heidegger does: for it is as a revelation to
itself that the For-itself is its Past, as that which it has-to-be-
for-itself in a nihilating surpassing; and it is as a revelation to
itself that it is a lack and that it is haunted by its future —
that is, by that which it is for itself down there at a distance.
The Present is not ontologically “prior” to the Past and to the
Future; it is conditioned by them as much as it conditions
them, but it is the mould of indispensable non-being for the
total synthetic forms of Temporality.
Thus Temporality is not a universal time containing all
beings and in particular human realities. Neither is it a law of
development which is imposed on being from without. Nor
is it being. But it is the intra-structure of the being which is
its own nihilation— that is, the mode of being peculiar to
being-for-itself. The For-itself is the being which has to be its
being in the diasporatic form of Temporality.
B. Tete Dynamic of Temporality
The fact that the upsurge of the For-itself is necessarily effect-
ed according to the three dimensions of Temporality teaches us
Possibly an error for the “reflection-reflecting,” which Sartre has used
elsewhere.
®Tr. I find it impossible to transfer the exact meaning from French to
English. Chassi-croisi, literally a dancing expression, is equivalent to “set
to partners.” From it derives the meaning of a futile rearrangement of
personneL
TEMPORALITY
203
nothing concerning the problem of duration, which falls un-
der the heading of the dynamic of time. At first approach the
problem appears twofold. Why does the For-itself undergo
that modification of its being which makes it become Past?
And why. does a new For-itself arise ex nihilo to become the
Present of this Past?
This problem has for a long time been disguised by a
conception of the human being as an in-itselE. It is the
sinew of Kant’s refutation of Berkeley’s idealism and a favorite
argument of Leibniz that change by itself implies permanence.
Consequently if we suppose a certain non-temporal perma-
nence which remains across time, temporality is reduced to
being no more than the measure and order of change. With-
out change there is no temporality since time could not get
any hold on the permanent and the identical. Moreover if as
with Leibniz change itself is given as the logical explanation
of a relation of conclusions to premises — ^that is, as the de-
velopment of the attributes of a permanent subject — ^then there
is no longer any real temporality.
But this conception is based on several errors. First of all,
the subsistence of a permanent element apart from something
which changes can not allow change to be constituted as such
except in the eyes of a witness who would be himself united
with that which changes and with that which remains. In a
word the unity of change and the permanent is necessary for
the constitution of change as such. But this same term unity,
which Leibniz and Kant have misused, does not signify very
much here. What is meant by this unity of disparate ele-
ments? Is it only a purely external attachment? Then it has no
meaning. It must be a unity of being. But such a unity of
being amounts to requiring that the permanent be that which
changes; and hence the unity is at the start ekstatic and refers
to the For-itself inasmuch as the For-itself is essentially ekstat-
ic being; in addition the unity prevents permanence and
change from existing each as in-itself. What is not said is
that permanence and change are taken here as phenomena and
have only a relative being; the In-itself is not opposed
to phenomena as the noumenon is. A phenomenon is in-itself,
according to the very terms of our definition, when it is what
It is, even if it is in relation with a subject or another phe-
immenon. Moreover the appearance of relation as determining
the phenomena in connection with each other supposes an-
tecedently the upsurge of an ekstatic being which can be what
204 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
it is not in order to establish the “elsewhere” and relation in
general.
Moreover resorting to permanence in order to furnish
the foundation for change is completely useless. What Kant
and Leibniz want to show is that an absolute change is no
longer strictly speaking change since it is no longer based on
anything which changes — or in relation to which there is
change. But in fact if what changes is its former state in the
past mode, this is sufficient to make permanence superfluous.
In this case change can be absolute; we can be dealing with a
metamorphosis which touches all of being; it will be consti-
tuted as change in relation to a prior state just as it will be
in the Past in the mode of was. Since this link with the past
replaces the pseudo-necessity of permanence, the problem of
duration can and ought to be posited in relation to absolute
changes. Moreover there is no other kind even “in the
world.” Up to a certain threshold changes are non-existent;
past this threshold, they extend to the total form — as the
experiments of the Gestalt school have shown.
In addition when we are dealing with human reality, what
is necessary is pure and absolute change, which can very well
be in addition a change with nothing which changes and
which is actual duration. Even if we admitted, for example,
that the simple consciousnesss of a For-itself was the abso-
lutely empty presence of this For-itself to a permanent In-
itself, stUl the very existence of the consciousness would imply
ternporality since it would have to be without change what it
is in the^form of “having been it.” There would be then not
eternity but the constant necessity for the present For-itself to
become the Past of a new Present and that by virtue of the
very being of consciousness. And if someone should tell us
that this perpetual recovery of the Present in the Past by a new
Present implies an inner change in the For-itself, we should
reply that then it is the temporality of the For-itself which is
the foundation of the change and not the change which
furnishes the foundation for temporality. Nothing can hide
me foUowing problems which at first seem insoluble: Why
oes the Present become the Past? What is this new Present
w ich then springs forth? Where does it come from, and why
does It arise? We must note that as is shown by our hypothesis
ot an ‘empty” consciousness, the question here is not the
necessity or a permanence to cascade from instant to instant
wtule remammg materially a permanence. The real question
TEMPORALITY
205
is the necessity for being, whatever it may be, to metamor-
phose itself completely at once — ^form and content, to sink
into the past and to thrust itself forward at the same time
ex nihilo toward the future.
But are these really two problems? Let us look more
closely. The Present could not pass except by becoming the
before of a For-itself which constitutes itself as the after of
that Present. There is then only one phenomenon: the up-
surge of a new Present which is making-past the Present
which it was, and the Making-Past of a Present involving the
appearance of a For-itself for which this Present is going to
become Past The phenomenon of temporal becoming is a
global modification since a Past which would be the Past
of nothing would no longer be a Past and since a Present
must be necessarily the Present of this Past. This metamor-
phosis, moreover, affects not only the pure Present; the for-
mer Past and Future are equally affected. The Past of the
Present which has undergone the modification of Pastness,
becomes the Past of a Past— or a Pluperfect. So far as the
Pluperfect is concerned, the heterogeneity of the Present
and the Past is now suddenly suppressed since what made
the Present distinct as such from the Past has now become
Past. In the course of the metamorphosis the Present remaios
the Present of this Past, but it becomes the past Present of
this Past. That means first that this present is homogeneous
with the series of the Past which extends from it all the way
back to its birth, second that this present is no longer its Past
in the form of having to be it but in the mode of having had
to be it. The connection between Past and Pluperfect is a con-
nection which is in the mode of the In-itself, and it appears
on the foundation of the present For-itself. It is this which
holds the series of the Past and pluperfects welded into a
single block.
The Future, on the other hand, although equally affected
by the metamorphosis, does not cease to be future — ^that is, to
remain outside the For-itself, in advance, beyond being — ^but
It becomes the future of a past or a former future. It can enter
into two kinds of relations with the new Present according to
whether we are dealing with the immediate Future or the far
Future. In the first case the Present is given as being this
ruture m relation to the Past: “What I was waiting for —
here it is.” It is the Present of its Past in the mode of the
ormer Future of this Past. But at the same time that it is
206 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
For-itself as the Future of this Fast, it realizes itself as For-
itself, therefore as not being what the Future promised to be.
There is a split: the Present becomes the Former Future of the
Past while denying that it is this Future. And the original
Future is not realized; it is no longer future in relation to
the Present, but it does not cease to be future in relation to the
Past. It becomes the unrealizable co-present of the Present and
perserves a total ideality. “Is this what I was waiting for?” It
remains a future ideally co-present with the Present, as the un-
realized Future of the Past of this Present.
When the Future is far removed, it remains future in
relation to the new Present; but if the Present does not con-
stitute itself as the lack of this Future, then this Future loses
its character as possibility. In this case the former Future be-
comes an indifferent possible in relation to the new Present
and not its Possible. In this sense it no longer possibilizes it-
self but qua possible it receives being-in-itself. It becomes a
given Possible; that is, a Possible which is in-itself for a For-
itself become In-itself. Yesterday it was possible — as my Possi-
ble — ^that I should leave next Monday for the country. To-
day this Possible is no longer my Possible; it remains the
thematized object of my contemplation and has become the
always future Possible which I have been. But its only
bond with my Present is that I have to be in the mode of
“was” this Present become Past for which this possible has not
ceased being a possible — ^beyond my Present. But Future and
past Present are solidified in the In-itself on the foundation
of my Present. Thus the Future, in the course of the temporal
process, passes to the in-itself without ever losing its character
as Future. In so far as it is not achieved by the Present, it
becomes simply a given Future. When it is achieved, it is
affected with the quality of ideality; but this ideality is ideality
in-itself, for it presents itself as a given lack of a given past and
not as the lacking which a present For-itself has to be in the
mode of not being. When the Future is surpassed, it remains
forever on the margin of the series of Pasts as a former Future
- a -former Future of a particular Past become Pluperfect, an
ideal given Future as co-present to a Present become Past.
We have yet to examine the metamorphosis of the pres-
ent For-itself into the Past with the accompanying upsurge
of a new Present. It would be an error to believe that the
former Present is abolished and that there arises a Present in-
itself which retains an image of the vanished Present. In one
TEMPORALITY
207
sense it would almost be correct to reverse our terms in order
to find the truth, for the making-past of the ex-present is a
passage to the in-itself while the appearance of a new present
is the nihilation of that in-itself. The Present is not a new In-
itself; it is what it is not, that which is beyond being; it is that
of which we can say “it is” only in the Past. The Past is not
abolished; it is that which has become what it was; it is the
Being of the Present. Finally, as we have sufficiently demon-
strated, the relation of the Present to the Past is a relation of
being, not of representation.
Consequently the first characteristic which strikes us is the
reapprehension of the For-itself by Being, as if the For-itself
no longer had the strength to sustain its own nothingness. That
deep fissure which the For-itself has to be is filled up; the
Nothingness which must “be made-to-be” ceases to be, is ex-
pelled with the result that Being-For-itself, made past, becomes
a quality of the In-itself. . If I have experienced a particular
sadness in the past, it exists no longer in so far as I have made
myself experience it. This sadness no longer has the exact
measure of being which can be enjoyed by an appearance
which makes itself its own witness. It is because it has been;
being comes to it, so to speak, as an external necessity. The
Past is a fatality in reverse. The For-itself can make itself what
it wishes, but it can not escape from tlie necessity of being ir-
remediably — ^for a new For-itself — ^what it has wished to be.
Hence the Past is a For-itself which has ceased to be a tran-
scending presence to the In-itself. Now become an in-itself, it
has fallen into the midst of the world. What I have to be I
am as a presence to the world which I am not but which I
"Was; I Was it in the midst of the world, just as things are,
by virtue of existing within-the-world. Nevertheless this
world in which the For-itself has to be what it was can not be
the same as that to which it is actually present. Thus is con-
stituted the Past of the For-itself as the past presence to a past
state of the world. Even if the world has undergone no vari-
ation while the For-itself “passed” from the Present to the Past,
it is at least apprehended as having undergone the same for-
mal change which we described earlier as taking place at the
heart of being-for-itseif. This is a change which is only a
reflection of the true internal change of consciousness. In
other words, the For-itself falling into the Past as an ex-
presence-to-being becomes in-itself, becomes a being “in-the-
midst-of-the-world,” and the world is retained in the past
208 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
dimension as that in the midst of which the past For-itself is
in itself. Like the mermaid whose human body is completed in
the tail of a fish, the extra-mxmdane For-itself is completed
behind itself as a thing in the world. I am angry, melancholy,
I have an Oedipus complex or an inferiority complex for
always, but in the past in the form of the “was” in the midst
of the world — ^just as I am a civil servant or a man with one
arm or a proletarian. In the past the world surrounds me, and
I lose myself in the universal determinism; but I radically
transcend my past toward the future to the same extent that
I “was it.”
A For-itself which has squeezed out all its nothingness and
been reapprehended by the In-itself, a For-itself dissolving in-
to the world — such is the Past which I have to be, such is the
avatar of the For-itself. But this avatar is produced in unity
with the appearance of a For-itself which nihilates itself as
Presence to the world and which has to be the Past which it
transcends. What is the meaning of this upsurge? We must
guard against seeing here the appearance of a new being.
Everything happens as if the Present were a perpetual hole in
being — ^immediately filled up and perpetually reborn — as if the
Present were a perpetual flight away from the snare of the
“in-itself’ which threatens it until that final victory of the in-
itself which will drag it into a past \vhich is no longer the past
of any For-itself. It is death which is this victory, for death is
the foal arrest of Temporality by the making-past of the
whole system or, if you prefer, by the recapture of human
Totality by the In-itself.
How can we explain this dynamic character of temporal-
ity? If it is not — as we hope we have demonstrated — a con-
tingent quality which is added to the being of the for-itself,
we must be able to show that its dynamic is an essential
structure of the For-itself conceived as the being which has to
be its own nothingness. We find ourselves once more, it seems,
at our point of departure.
But the truth is that there is no problem. If we believe that
we have met one, this is because in spite of our efforts to think
of the for-itself as really for-itself, we have not been able to
prevent ourselves from fixing it in the in-itself. If we start
from the in-itself, the appearance of change can indeed con-
stitute a problem: if the in-itself is what it is, how can it
no longer be so? But if, on the contrary, we proceed from an
adequate comprehension of the for-itself, it is no longer
TEMPORALITY
209
change which needs explaining but rather permanence — ^if
permanence can exist. In fact if we consider our description
of the order of time apart from everything which could come
from the course of time, it is clear that a temporality reduced
to its order' would immediately become temporality in-itself.
The ekstatic character of temporal being would not change
anything here since this character is found in the past, not
as constitutive of the for-itself but as a quality supported by
the in-itself. If we imagine a Future such that it is purely
and simply the Future of a for-itself, which is the for-itself of
a certain past, and if we consider that change is a new prob-
lem in relation to the description of temporality as such, then
we confer _on the Future, conceived as this Future, an in-
stantaneous immobility; we make of the for-itself a fixed
quality which can be designated; and finally the ensemble
becomes a made totality, the future and the past restrict the
for-itself and constitute given limits for it. The ensemble, as
temporality which is, is petrified around a solid nucleus,
which is the present instant of the for-itself, and the problem
is then indeed to explain how from this instant can arise an-
other instant with its own cortege of past and future. We have
escaped instantaneity in the sense that the instant would be
the only in-itself reality limited by a nothingness of the future
and a nothingness of the past, but we have fallen back into it
by implicitly admitting a succession of temporal totalities of
which each one would be centered around an instant. In a
word, we have endowed the instant with ekstatic dimensions,
but we have not thereby suppressed it, which means that we
cause temporal totality to be supported by the non-temporal.
Time, if it is, becomes again merely a.dream.
But change belongs naturally to the for-itself inasmuch as
this for-itself is spontaneity. A spontaneity of which we can
say: it w. Or simply: This spontaneity should be allowed
to define itself; this means both that it is the foundation not
only of its nothingness of being but also of its being and that
simultaneously being recaptures it to fix it in the given. A
spontaneity which posits itself qua spontaneity is obliged by
the same stroke to refuse what it posits; otherwise its being
would become an acquisition and it would be perpetuated in
being as the result of being acquired. Yet this refusal it-
self is an acquisition which it must refuse lest it be ensnared
in an inert prolongation of its existence. Someone may say
that these ideas of prolongation and of acquisition already
210
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
suppose temporality, and that is true. But this is because
spontaneity itself constitutes the acquisition by the refusal
and the refusal by the acquisition, for spontaneity can riot be
without temporalizing itself. Its peculiar nature is not to profit
from the acquisition which it constitutes by realizing itself
as spontaneity. It is impossible otherwise to conceive of spon-
taneity without contracting it within an instant and thereby
fixing it in in-self; that is, without supposing a transcendent
time. It would be in vain to object that we cannot think of
anything except in temporal form and that our account begs
the question since we temporalize being in order to make time
spring from it a little afterwards. It would be useless to remind
us of the passages in the Critique where Kant shows that a
non-temporal spontaneity is inconceivable but not contradic-
tory. It seems to us, on the contrary, that a spontaneity which
would not escape from itself and which would not escape
from that very escape, of which we could say, “It is this,”
and which would allow itself to be enclosed in an unchange-
able denomination — it seems that such a spontaneity would
be precisely a contradiction and that it would ultimately be
the equivalent of a particular aflarmative essence, the eternal
subject which is never a predicate. Moreover it is precisely its
character as spontaneity which constitutes the very irrevers-
ibility of its evasions since from the moment of its appearance
it is in order to refuse itself and since the order “positing-
refusing” can not be reversed. The very positing is achieved
in a refusing without ever attaining to an affirmative pleni-
tude; otherwise it would be exhausted in an instantaneous in-
itself, and it is only because it is refused that it passes to
being in the totality of its accomplishment. The unitary series
of “acquisitions-refused” has in addition an ontological priority
over change, for change is simply the relation of the material
contents of the senes. But we have shown that the very irre-
versibility of temporalization® is necessary to the completely
empty and a priori form of a spontaneity.
I have presented this thesis by using the concept of spon-
taneity which seemed to me more familiar to my readers. But
we can now take up these ideas again in the perspective of
terminology. A for-itself
w ich did not endure would remain of course a negation of
e transcendent in-itself and a nihilation of its own being in
the form of the “reflection-reflecting.” But this nihilation
«Tr. Correction for temporizatlok. an obvious misprint.
TEMPORALITY
211
would become a given; that is, it would acquire the contin-
gency of the in-itself, and the For-itself would cease to be the
foundation of its own nothingness; it would no longer be as
having to be, but in the nihilating unity of the dyad reflection-
reflecting, it would be. The flight of the for-itself is the refusal
of contingency by the very act which constitutes the for-itself
as being the foundation of its nothingness. But this flight es-
tablishes in contingency exactly what is fled: the for-itself
which has been fled is left at its place. It can not be anni-
hilated since I am it, but neither can it any longer be as the
foundation of its own nothingness since it can be this only in
flight. It is finished. \^fliat applies to the for-itself as presence
tcH is also naturally appropriate as well to the totality
of temporalization. This totality never is achieved; it is a
totality which is refused and which flees from itself. It is
the wrenching away from self within the unity of a single
upsurge, an inapprehensible totality which at the moment
when it gives itself is ready beyond this gift of self.
Thus the time of consciousness is human reality which
temporalizes itself as the totality which is to itself its own in-
completion; it is nothingness slipping into a totality as a de-
totalizing ferment. This totality which runs after itself and
refuses itself at the same time, which can find in itself no
limit to its surpassing because it is its own surpassing and
because it surpasses itself toward itself, can under no cir-
cumstance exist within the limits of an instant. There is
never an instant at which we can assert that the for-itself is,
precisely because the for-itself never is. Temporality, on the
contrary, temporalizes itself entirely as the refusal of the in-
stant.
m. ORIGINAL TEMPORALITY AND
PSYCHIC TEMPORALITY: REFLECTION
The for-itself endures in the form of a non-thetic conscious-
ness (of) enduring. But I can “feel the time which flows” and
apprehend myself as a unity of succession. In this case I am
conscious of enduring. This consciousness is thetic and
strongly resembles a knowledge just as duration which is tem-
poralized under my regard is roughly like an object of knowl-
edge. What relation can exist between original temporality
and this psychic temporality which I encounter as soon as I
212
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
apprehend myself “in process of enduring”? This problem
brings us immediately to another problem, for the conscious-
ness of duration is a consciousness of a consciousness which
endures; consequently to posit the question of the nature and
laws of this thetic consciousness of duration amounts to posit-
ing that of the nature and the laws of reflection. In fact tem-
porality in the form of psychic duration belongs to reflection,
and all the processes of psychic duration belong to the con-
sciousness reflected-on.
Before asking how a psychic duration can be constituted
as the immanent object of reflection, we must try to answer
this preliminary question: how is reflection possible for a
being which can be only in the past? Reflection is given by
Descartes and by Husserl as a type of privileged intuition be-
cause it apprehends consciousness in an act of present and
instantaneous immanence. Will it keep its certitude if the
being which it has to know is past in relation to it? And since
all our ontology has its foundation in a reflective experience,
does it not risk losing all its laws? Yet is it actually the past
being which should make the object of reflective conscious-
ness? If the process of reflection itself is a for-itself, ought it
to be limited to an existence and certitude which are in-
stantaneous? We can decide these questions only if we return
« reflective phenomenon and determine its structure.
^ Reflection is the for-itself conscious of itself. As the for-
itself is already a non-thetic self-consciousness, we are accus-
tomed to represent reflection as a new consciousness, abruptly
appearing, directed on the consciousness reflected-on, and
living m symbiosis with it. One recalls here the old idea ideae
of Spinoza.
But aside from the fact that it is difiicult to explain the
upurge ex nihilo of the reflective consciousness, it is com-
pletely impossible in this way to account for its absolute unity
Jirc consciousness reflected-on, a unity which alone ren-
® certainty of the reflective
whiVfl^c' cannot here indeed say that the esse of that
doe!\ t ^ percipi since its being is such that it
perceived in order to exist. And its
ofT reflection can not be the unitary relation
tent ifto ^ thinking subject. If the known exis-
then in ^ ^.^nie rank of being as the knowing existent,
must descrihn Perspective of naive realism that we
describe the relation of these two existents. But in this
TEMPORALITY
213
case we are going to encounter the major difficulty of real-
ism: how can two completely isolated independents, provided
with that sufficiency of being which the Germans call Selb-
stdndigkeit, enter into relation with each other, and in particu-
lar how can they enter into that type of internal relation
which we call knowledge? If iirst we conceive of reflection
as an autonomous consciousness, we shall never be able to
reunite it later with the consciousness reflected-on. They will
always be two, and if — ^to suppose the impossible — ^the reflec-
tive consciousness could be consciousness of the consciousness
reflected-on, there could be only an external connection be-
tween the two consciousnesses; at most we could imagine that
reflection isolated in itself possesses an image of the conscious-
ness reflected-on, and we would then fall back into idealism.
Reflective knowledge, and in particular the cogito would lose
their certainty and would obtain in exchange only a certain
probability, scarcely definable. It is agreed then that reflection
must be united to that which is reflected-on by a bond of
being, that the reflective consciousness must be the conscious-
ness reflected-on.
But on the other hand, there can be no question here of a
total identification of the reflective with that reflected-on, for
this would suddenly suppress the phenomenon of reflection by
allowing only the phantom dyad “the reflection-reflecting”^
to subsist. Here once again we meet that type of being which
defines the for-itself: reflection — ^if it is to be apodictic evi-
dence — demands that the reflective be that which is reflected-
on. But to the extent that reflection is knowledge, the re-
flected-on must necessarily be the object for the reflective; and
this implies a separation of being. Thus it is necessary that the
^Tr. The translator encounters a difficulty here owing to the fact that
the English word “reflection” has two different meanings which are perfectly
distinct in French. In discussing the dyad “reflection-reflecting,” Sartre uses
reflet-reflSiant: Here “reflection” means that which is reflected — ^hke an image
and easily suggests to Sartre the idea of a game with mirrors. In the
present section, however, the subject of discussion is reflexion, which means
0 process of mental reflection in general and in particular introspection.
^ a feeble attempt to prevent confusion, I am in this section using the
artic e with reflet, the “reflection” in the dyad, and in some cases I am
Btvmg the French as well.
sitnilar but less insoluble difficulty occurs with words deriving from
c r (to reflect in the sense of reflexion") and refliter (to reflect an
age). To distinguish these 1 am using the English expression “reflect-on”
ere mental action is involved. “Reflective” also indicates the mental
process of reflection.
214 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
reflective simultaneously be and not be the refiected-on. We
have already discovered this ontological structure at the
heart of the for-itself. But then it did not have at all the
same meaning. In fact it supposed in the two terms “reflected
and reflecting” a radical Unselbstdndigkeit on the part of the
suggested duality; that is, such an inability on the part of the
terms to be posited separately that the duality remained per-
petually evanescent and each term, while positing itself for
the other, became the other. But in the case of reflection, the
case is slightly different since “the reflection-reflecting”
which is reflected'On exists for a “reflection-reflecting”
which is reflective. In other words, the reflected-on is an ap-
pearance for the reflective without thereby ceasing to be wit-
ness (of) itself, and the reflective is witness of the reflected-on
without thereby ceasing to be an* appearance to itself. It is
even in so far as it is reflected in itself {se rcficte en soi) that
the reflected-on is an appearance for the reflective, and the re-
flective can be witness only in so far as it is consciousness (of)
being so; that is, to the exact extent that this witness, which
it is, is a reflection {reflet) for a reflecting which it is also. Re-
flected-on and reflective therefore each tend to the Selbstdn-
digkeit, and the nothing which separates them divides them
more profoundly than the nothingness of the for-itself sepa-
rates the reflection (reflet) from the reflecting.
Yet we must note two things: (1) Reflection (reflexion)
as witness can have its being as witness only in and through
the appearance; that is, it is profoundly affected in its being by
its reflectivity and consequently can never achieve the Selbstdn-
digkeit at which it aims, since it derives its being from its func-
tion and its function from the for-itself reflected-on. (2) The
reflected-on is profoundly altered by reflection (reflexion) in
this sense that it is self-consciousness as the consciousness re-
flected-on of this or that transcendent phenomenon. The
reflected-on knows itself observed. It may best be compared —
to use a concrete example — ^to a man who is writing, bent
over a table, and who while writing knows that he is observed
y somebody who stands behind him. The refiected-on has
then, in a way, already a consciousness (of) itself as having
an outside or rather the suggestion of an outside; that is, it
jlself^ an object for so that its meaning as
re ec ed-on is inseparable from the reflective and exists over
ere at a istance from itself in the consciousness which re-
TEMPORALITY 215
fleets on it. In this sense the reflected-on does not possess
Selbstandigkeit any more than the reflective itself.
Husserl tells us that the reflected-on “gives itself as hav-
ing been there before reflection.” But we must not be de-
ceived here; the Selbstandigkeit of the not-reflected-on qua not-
reflected-on in relation to all possible reflection does not pass
into the phenomenon of reflection, for the phenomenon loses
its character as not reflected-on. For a consciousness, to be-
come reflected-on means to undergo a profound modification
of its being and precisely to lose the Selbstandigkeit which it
possessed as the quasi-totality “the reflected-reflecting.”
Finally, to the extent that a nothingness separates the re-
flected-on from the reflective, this nothingness, which cannot
derive its being from itself, must “be made-to-be.” Let us
understand by this that only a unitary structure of being
can be its own nothingness in the form of having to be
it. In fact neither the reflective nor the reflected-on can issue
this separating nothingnesss. But reflection is one being,
just like the unreflective for-itself, not an addition of being; it
is a being which has to be its own nothingness. It is not the
appearance of a new consciousness directed on the for-itself
but an intra-structural modification which the for-itself realizes
in itself; in a word it is the for-itself which makes itself
exist in the mode reflective-reflected-on, instead of being
simply in the mode of the dyad reflection-reflecting; further-
more, this new mode of being allows the mode of the re-
flection-reflecting to subsist as a primary inner structure. The
one who is reflecting on me is not some sort of non-
temporal regard but myself, myself who am enduring engaged
in the circuit of my selfness, in danger in the world, with my
historicity. This historicity and this being-in-the-world and
this circuit of selfness — these the for-itself which I am lives in
the mode of the reflective dissociation (dedoublement) .
As we have seen, the reflective is separated from the re-
flected-on by a nothingness. Thus the phenomenon of re-
flection is a nihil ation of the for-itself, a nihilation which does
i^t come to it from without but which it has to be. Where is
me origin of this further nihilation? What can be its motiva-
tion?
1 },^^ upsurge of the for-itself as presence to being,
stc is an original dispersion: the for-itself is lost outside,
next m the^ in-itself, and in the three temporal ekstases. It is
ou side of itself, and in its inmost heart this being-for-itself is
216 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ekstatic since it must look for its being elsewhere — in the re-
flecting (refietant) if it makes itself a reflection (reflet), in
the reflection if it posits itself as reflecting. The upsurge of
the for-itself confirms the failure of the in-itself, which has
not been able to be its own foundation. Reflection (reflexion)
remains for the for-itself a permanent possibility, an attempt
to recover being. By reflection the for-itself, which has
lost itself outside itself, attempts to put itself inside its own
being. Reflection is a second effort by the for-itself to found
itself; that is, to be for itself what it is. Indeed if the quasi-
dyad the reflection-reflecting were gathered up into a totality
for a witness which would be itself, it would be in its own
eyes what it is. The goal in short is to overtake that being
which flees itself while being what it is in the mode of not-
being and which flows on while being its own flow, which
escapes between its own fingers; the goal is to make of it a
given, a given which finally is what it is; the problem is to
gather together in the unity of one regard this unachieved
totality which is unachieved only because it is to itself its own
non-achievement, to escape from the sphere of the perpetual
reference which has to be a reference to itself, and — ^precisely
because it has escaped from the chains of this reference — ^to
make it be as a seen reference — ^that is, as a reference which
is what it is.
But at the same time it is necessary that this being which
recovers itself and establishes itself as a given — that is, which
confers on itself the contingency of being in order to preserve
it while founding it — this must itself be that which it re-
covers and founds, that which it preserves from the ekstatic
scattering. The motivation of reflection (reflexion) consists in
a double attempt, simultaneously an objectivation and an in-
teriorization. To be to itself as an object-in-itself in the abso-
lute unity of interiorization — that is what the being-of-reflec-
tion has to be.
This effort to be to itself its own foundation, to recover
and to dominate within itself its own flight, finally to be that
flight instead of temporalizing it as the flight which is fled —
this effort inevitably results in failure; and it is precisely this
failure which is reflection. In fact it is itself the being which
has to recover the being which is lost, and it must be this
recovery in the mode of being which is its own; that is, in the
mode of the for-itself, therefore of flight. It is qua for-itself
TEMPORALITY
217
that the for-itself will try to be what it is or, if you prefer, it
will be for itself what it is-for-itself. Thus reflection or the
attempt to recover the for-itself by a turning back on itself
results in the appearance of the for-itself for the for-itself.
The being which wants to find a foundation in being is itself
the foundation only of its own nothingness. The ensemble
consequently remains a nihilated in-itself. At the same time
the turning back of being on itself can only cause the appear-
ance of a distance between what turns back and that on which
it turns. This turning back upon the self is a wrenching
away from self in order to return to it. It is this turning back
which effects the appearance of reflective nothingness. For
the necessary structure of the for-itself requires that its being
can be recovered only by a being which itself exists in the
form of for-itself.® Thus the being which effects the recovery
must be constituted in the mode of the for-itself, and the
being which is to be recovered must exist as for-itself. And
these two beings must be the same being. But exactly in so far
as this being recovers itself, it causes an absolute distance to
exist between itself and itself — in the unity of being. This
phenomenon of reflection is a permanent possibility of the
for-itself because reflective scissiparity exists potentially in the
for-itself which is reflected-on; it suffices in fact that the re-
flecting for-itself {refletant) posit itself for it as a witness of
the reflection (reflet) and that the for-itself (the reflection)
posit itself for it as a reflection of this reflecting. Thus reflec-
tion (reflexion) as the effort of a for-itself to recover a for-
itself which it is in the mode of non-being is a stage of
nihilation intermediate between the pure and simple existence
of the for-itself and existence for-others; it is an act on the
part of a for-itself to recover a for-itself which it is not in the
mode of non-being.®
Can reflection thus described be limited in its laws and its
scope by the fact that the for-itself temporalizes itself? We
think not.
We must distinguish two kinds of reflection if we wish to
® Tr. The French says "without the form of,” which makes no sense and
must surely be a misprint.
We find here again that “division , of the equal to itselT* which Hegel
makes the peculiar trait of consciousness. But this division instead of
ea mg to a higher integration, as in the Phenomenology of Mind, only
es deeper and more irremediable the nothingness which separates
onsciousness from itself. Consciousness is Hegelian, but it is Hegel s
Breatest illusion.
218 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
grasp the reflective phenomenon in its relations with tem-
porality: reflection can be either pure or impure. Pure reflec-
tion, the simple presence of the reflective for-itself to the for-
itself reflected-on, is at once the original form of reflection
and its ideal form; it is that on whose foundation impure
reflection appears, it is that also which is never first given;
and it is that which must be won by a sort of katharsis. Impure
or accessory reflection, of which we will speak later, includes
pure reflection but surpasses it and makes further claims.
What are the evident claims and rights of pure re-
flection? Evidently the reflective is the reflected-on. Outside
of that we should have no means of legitimizing reflection.
But the reflective is the reflected-on in complete immanence
although in the form of “not-being-in-itself.” It is this which
well demonstrates the fact that the reflected-on is not wholly
an object but a quasi-object for reflection. Actually the con-
sciousness reflected-on is not presented yet as something out-
side reflection — ^that is, as a being on which one can “take a
point of view,” in relation to which one can realize a with-
drawal, increase or diminish the distance which separates one
from it. In order for the consciousness reflected-on to be
“viewed from without” and in order for reflection to be able
to orient itself in relation to it, it would be necessary that the
reflective should not be the reflected-on in the mode of not
being what it is not: the scissiparity wUl be realized only in
existence for~others.
Reflection is a knowledge; of that there is no doubt It is
provided with a positional character; it affirms the conscious-
ness reflected-on. But every afSrmation, as we shall soon see,
is conditioned by a negation: to affirm this object is simul-
taneously to deny that I am this object. To know is to make
oneself other. Now the reflective can not make itself wholly
other than the reflected-on since it is-in-order-to-be the re-
flected-on. Its affirmation is stopped halfway because its nega-
tion is not entirely realized. It does not then detach itself
completely from the reflected-on, and it can not grasp the re-
fiected-on “from a point of view.” Its knowledge is a totality;
it is a lightning intuition without relief, without point of de-
parture, and without point of arrival. Everything is given at
once in a sort of absolute proximity. What we ordinarily call
knowing supposes reliefs, levels, an order, a hierarchy. Even
mathematical essences are revealed to us with an orientation
m relation to other truths, to certain consequences; they are
TEMPORALITY
219
never disclosed with all their characteristics at once. But the
reflection which delivers the reflected-on to us, not as a given
but as the. being which we have to be, in indistinction without
a point of view, is a knowledge overflowing itself and without
explanation. At the same time it is never surprised by itself; it
does not teach us anything but only posits. In the knowledge
of a transcendent object indeed there is a revelation of the ob-
ject, and the object revealed can deceive or surprise us. But
in the reflective revelation there is a positing of a being whose
being was already a revelation. Reflection is limited to making
this revelation exist for itself; the revealed being is not re-
vealed as a given but with the character of the “already re-
vealed.” Reflection is a recognition rather than knowledge. It
implies as the original motivation of the recovery a pre-
reflective comprehension of what it wishes to recover.
But if the reflective is the reflected-on, if this unity of
being founds and limits the laws of reflection, it should be
added that the reflected-on, itself, is its past and its future.
There is then no doubt that although the totality of the re-
flected-on, which the reflective is in the mode of non-being,
perpetually overflows the reflective, still the reflective extends
its apodictic laws to that very totality which it is. Thus the
reflective achievement of Descartes, the cogito, must not be
limited to the infinitesimal instant. Moreover this conclusion
could be drawn from the fact that thought is an act which en-
gages the past and shapes its outline by the future. I doubt
Aerefore that I am, said Descartes. But what would remain of
methodological doubt if it could be limited to the instant? A
suspension of judgment, perhaps. But a suspension of judg-
ment is not a doubt; it is only a necessary structure of doubt.
In order for doubt to exist, it is necessary that this suspension
be motivated by an insuflaciency of reasons for affirming or for
denying — ^which refers to the past — and that it be maintained
deliberately until the intervention of new elements — ^which
is already a project of the future. Doubt appears on the foun-
dation of a pre-ontological comprehension of knowing and of
requirements concerning truth. This comprehension and these
requirements, which give all its meaning to doubt, engage the
totality of human reality and its being in the world; they sup-
pose the existence of an object of knowledge and of doubt
■^that is, of a transcendent permanence in universal time. It
IS then a related conduct which doubts the object, a conduct
Which represents one of the modes of the being-in-the-world
220 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
\
of human reality. To discover oneself doubting is already to be
ahead of oneself in the future, which conceals the end, the
cessation, and the meaning of this doubt, and to be belmd
oneself in the past, which conceals the constituent motivations
of the doubt and its stages of development, and to be outside
of oneself in the world as presence to the object which one
doubts. ^
These ' same observations would apply to any reflective
statement: I read, I dream, I perceive, I act. Either they should
lead us to refuse to grant apodictic evidence to reflection, and
then the original knowledge which I have of myself would
melt into mere probability and my ^ very existence is only a
probability (for my being-in-the-instant is not a being) — or
else we must extend the laws of reflection to human totality —
i.e., to the past, to the future, to presence, to the object But
if we have observed accurately, reflection is the for-itself
which seeks to recover itself as a totality in perpetual in-
completion. It is the affir mation of the revelation of the being
which is to itself its own revelation. As the for-itself temporal-
izes itself, there are these results: (1) Reflection, as the mode
of being of the for-itself, must be as temporalization, and it is
itself its past and its future. (2) By nature reflection extends
its laws and its certitude to the possibilities which I am and
to the past which I was. The reflective is not the apprehen-
sion of an instantaneous reflected-on, but neither is it itself
instantaneity. This does not mean that the reflective knows
with its future the future of the reflected-on and with its past
the past of the consciousness to be known. On the contrary
it is by means of the future and the past that the reflective
and the reflected-on are distinguished within the imity of their
being. The future of the reflective, in fact, is the ensemble of
ite own possibilities which the reflective has to be qua reflec-
tive. As such it could not include a consciousness of the future
reflected-on. The same remarks would be valid for the reflec-
tive past although this is founded ultimately in the past of the
original for-itself. But if reflection derives its meaning from its
future and its past, it is already as a fleeing presence to a
flight, ekstatically the whole length of this flight. In other
words the for-itself, which makes itself exist in the mode of
e reflective^ d^sociation, as for-itself derives its meaning
rom its possibilities and from its future. In this sense reflec-
tion IS a diasporatic phenomenon; but as a presence to itself,
TEMPORALITY 221
the for-itself is a presence present to all its ekstatic dimen-
sions.
It remains to explain, someone may say, how this reflection,
which you are claiming to be apodictic, can make so many
errors with respect to just that past which you give it the
capacity to know. I reply that it is free from any error to the
exact extent that it apprehends the past as that which haunts
the present in non-thematic form. When I say, “I read, I
doubt, I hope, etc” as we have shown, I reach beyond my
present toward the past. Now I cannot in any of these cases be
mistaken. The apodictic nature of reflection allows no doubt
in so far as it apprehends the past exactly as it is for the
consciousness reflected-on which has to be it. On the other
hand, I can make many an error when recalling to myself in
the reflective mode my past feelings or my past ideas; this is
because I am on the plane of memory. At that moment I no
longer am my past but I am thematizing it. We are then no
longer dealing with the reflective act.
Thus reflection is consciousness of the three ekstatic
dimensions. It is a non-thetic consciousness (of) flow and a
thetic consciousness of duration. For reflection the past and
the present of the reflected-on are set in existence as quasi-
outside in this sense: that they are not only held in the unity
of a for-itself which exhausts their being in having to be it
1 but also for a for-itself which is separated from them by a
; nothingness; they are for a for-itself which, while existing
[ with them in the unity of a being, does not have to be their
being. Through reflection also the flow reaches toward being
as an “outside” outlined in immanence. But pure reflection
I still discovers temporality only in its own original non-sub-
I stantiality, in its refusal to be in-itself. It discovers possibles qua
1 possibles, lightened by the freedom of the for-itself. It reveals
! the present as transcendent; and if the past appears to it as in-
itself, still the past is on the foundation of presence. Finally
reflection discovers the for-itself in its detotalized totality as
the incomparable individuality which reflection itself is in the
mode of having to be it. It discovers the for-itself as the “re-
flected-on, par excellence,” the being which is always only as
Itself and which is always this “self” at a distance from itself,
m the future, in the past, in the world. Reflection therefore
apprehends temporality and reveals it as the unique and in-
, comparable mode of being of a selfness — ^that is, as his-
toricity.
222 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
But the psychological duration which we know, and which
we daily make use of as successions of organized temporal
forms is the opposite of historicity. It is in fact the concrete
fabric of the psychic unities of the flow. This joy, for example,
is an organized form which appears after a sadness, and before
that there was that humiliation which I experienced yester-
day. Relations of before and after are commonly established
between these unities of flow, qualities, states, acts; and these
are the unities which can be used for dating. Thus the reflec-
tive consciousness of man-in-the-world in his daily existence
is found in the face of psychic objects which are what they
are, which appear in the continuous woof of our temporality
like the designs and motifs on a tapestry, and which succeed
each other in the manner of things in the world in universal
time; that is, by replacing each other without entering into
any relation other than the purely external relations of succes-
sion.
We speak of a joy which I have or which I had; we say
that it is my joy as if I were its support and as if it were
detached from me as the finite modes of Spinoza are detached
from the ground of the attribute. We even say that I experi-
ence this joy as if it came to imprint itself like a seal on
the texture of my teraporalization; or better yet, as if the pres-
ence in me of these feelings, of these ideas, of these states
were a sort of visitation. We can not call it an illusion — ^this
psychic duration constituted by the concrete flow of autono-
mous organizations; that is, in short, by the succession
of psychic facts, of facts of consciousness. Indeed it is their
reality which is the object of psychology. Practically it is on
the level of psychic fact that concrete relations between men
are established claims, jealousies, grudges, suggestions, strug-
gles, ruses, etc. Yet it is not conceivable that the unreflective
for-itself, which historicizes itself^® in its upsurge, should be
itself these qualities, these states, and these acts. Its unity of
being would dissolve into a multiplicity of existents external
to one another, the^ ontological problem of temporality would
reappear, and this time we would have removed all methods of
resolving it; for while it is possible for the for-itself to be its
own past, it would be absurd to require of my joy that it be
Itself in history or makes itself a history. Sartre uses
» bears the same relation to French that “historicizes
Itself bears to Enghsh.
TEMPORALITY 223
the sadness which preceded it, even in the mode of “non-
being.”
Psychologists give a degraded representation of this ekstat-
ic existence when they affirm that psychic facts are relative
to one another and that the thunder clap heard after a long
silence is apprehended as “thunder-clap-after-a-long-silence.”
This observation is well made, but they have prevented them-
selves from explaining this relativity in succession since they
have removed from it all ontological foundation. In fact if we
apprehend the for-itself in its historicity, psychic duration
vanishes and states, qualities, and acts disappear to give place
to being-for-itself as such, which is only as the unique in-
dividuality from which the process of historization cannot be
separated. It is this which flows, which calls to itself from the
ground of the future, and which is heavy with the past which
it was; it is this which historicizes its selfness, and we know
that it is — in the primary or unreflective mode — a conscious-
ness of the world and not of self. Thus qualities and states
could not be beings in its being (in the sense that the unity of
the flow of joy would be “contained” or “made” by con-
sciousness) . There exist only the internal, non-positional color-
ations of it; these are nothing other than itself qua for-itself,
and they can not be apprehended outside of it.
Here we are then in the presence of two temporalities:
the original temporality of which we are the temporaliza-
tion, and psychic temporality which simultaneously appears as
incompatible with the mode of being of our being and as an
inter-subjective reality, the object of science, the goal of hu-
man acts (in the sense, for example, that I do ever5ffiiing
possible to ''make Annie love me" to “endow her with love
for me”). This psychic temporality, which is evidently de-
rived, can not stem directly from original temporality; the
latter constitutes nothing other than itself. As for psychic
temporality, it is incapable of constituting itself, for it is only
a successive order of facts. Moreover psychic temporality
could not appear to the unreflective for-itself, which is pure
ekstatic presence to the world. Psychic temporality reveals it-
self to reflection, and reflection must constitute it But how
can reflection constitute it if reflection is the pure and simple
discovery of the historicity which it is?
Here we must distinguish between pure reflection and im-
pure or constituent reflection, for it is impure reflection which
constitutes the succession of psychic facts or psyche. What
224
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
is given first in daily life is impure or constituent reflection al-
thou^ this includes pure reflection as its original structure.
But pure reflection can be attained only as the result of a mod-
ification which it effects on itself and which is in the form of
a katharsis. This is not the place to describe the motivation
and the structure of this katharsis. What matters to us is the
description of impure reflection inasmuch as. it constitutes
and reveals psychic temporality.
Reflection, as we have seen, is a type of being in which
the for-itself is in order to be to itself what it is. Reflection is
not then a capricious upsurge into the pure indifference of
being, but it arises in the perspective of a for. We have seen
here that the for-itself is the being which in its being is the
foundation of a for. The meaning of reflection is then its
being-for. Specifically the reflective is the reflected-on nihilat-
ing itself for^^ recovering itself. In this sense the reflective, in
so far as it has to be the reflected-on, escapes from the
for-itself which it is as reflective in the form of “having to
be it.” But if it were only in order to be the reflected on which
it has to be, it would escape from the for-itself in order to
rediscover it; everywhere and in whatever manner it affects
itself, the for-itself is condemned to be-for-itself. In fact, it is
here that pure reflection is discovered.
But impure reflection, which is the first spontaneous
(but not the original) reflective movement, is-in-order-to-be
the reflected-on as in-itself. Its motivation is within it in the
twofold movement, which we have already described, of in-
teriorization and of objectivation: to apprehend the reflected-
on as in-itself in order to make itself be that in-itself which
is apprehended. Impure reflection then is the apprehension
of the reflected-on as such only in a circuit of selfness in
which reflection stands in immediate relation with an in-
itself which it has to be. But on the other hand, this in-itself
which reflection has to be, is the reflected-on in so far as the
reflective tries to^ apprehend it as being in-itself. This means
that three forms exist in impure reflection: the reflective, the
reflected-on, and an in-itself which the reflective has to be in
so far as this in-itself would be the reflected-on, an in-itself
which is nothing other than the For of the reflective phenom-
enon. This in-itself is pre-outlined behind the for-itself —
reflected-on, by a reflection {reflexion) which traverses the
Tr. Etre-pour. In French the pour can mean either for or in order
to, both of which are impUed in etre-pour.
TEMPORALITY
225
refiected-on in order to recover it and to found it; it is like
the projection into the in-itself on the part of the for-itself
reflected-on — as a meaning: its being is not to be but to be-
made-to-be, like nothingness. It is the reflected-on as a pure
object for the reflective; as soon as reflection adopts a point of
view on the reflective, as soon as it gets out of that lightning
intuition without relief in which the reflected-on is given with-
out a point of view for the reflective, as soon as it posits itself
as not being the reflected-on, and as soon as it determines
what the reflected-on is, then reflection effects the appearance
of an in-itself capable of being determined, qualified, behind
the reflected-on. This transcendent in-itself or shadow cast by
the reflected-on onto being is what the reflective has to be in
so far as it is that which the reflected-on is.
Yet this in-itself should not be confused with the value
of the reflected-on, which is given to reflection in a total,
undifferentiated intuition — ^nor with the value which haunts
the reflective as a non-thetic absence and as the For of
reflective consciousness in so far as it is a non-positional self-
consciousness. This in-itself is the necessary object of all
reflection. In order that it may arise, it is enough that reflec-
tion confront the reflected-on as object. It is the very decision
by which reflection determines itself to consider the reflected-
on as object which causes the in-itself to appear as the tran-
scendent objectivation of the reflected-on. The act by which
reflection determines itself to take the reflected-on as object
is itself (1) a positing of the reflective as not being the re-
flected-on, (2) the adoption of a point of view in relation to
the reflected-on. Moreover in reality these two moments make
only one since the concrete negation which the reflective
makes itself be in relation to the reflected-on manifests itself
precisely in and through the fact of taking a point of view.
The objectivating act, as we see, lies in the strict extensions
of the reflective dissociation since this dissociation is made by
the deepening of the nothingness which separates the reflection
(reflet) from the reflecting (refletant). The objectivation re-
covers the reflective movement as not being the reflected-on
in order that the reflected-on may appear as an object for the
reflective.
However this reflection is in bad faith. To be sure, it
appears to cut the bond which unites the reflected-on to the
226 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
reflective, and it seems to declare that the reflective is not the
reflected-on in the mode of not being what one is not, at a
time when in the original reflective upsurge, the reflective
is not the reflected-on in the mode of what one is. But this
is only in order to recover subsequently the affirmation of
identity and to affirm concerning this in-itself that “I am zf.”
In a word, reflection is in bad faith in so far as it constitutes
itself as the revelation of the object which I make-to-be-me.
But in the second place this more radical nihilation is not a
real, metaphysical event The real event, the third process of
nihilation is the for-others. Impure reflection is an abortive
effort on the part of the for-itself to be another while remain-
ing itself. The transcendent object which appeared behind the
for-itself-reflected-on is the only being of which the reflective
can say — in this sense — that it is not it. But it is a mere
shadow of being. It is made-to-be and the reflective has to be
it in order not to be it. It is this shadow of being, the neces-
sary and constant correlate of impure reflection that the psy-
chologist studies under the name of psychic fact. A psychic
fact is then the shadow of the reflected-on inasmuch as the
reflective has to be it ekstatically in the mode of non-being.
Thus reflection is impure when it gives itself as an “intuition
of the for-itself in in-itself.” What is revealed to it is not the
temporal and non-substantial historicity of the reflected-on;
beyond this reflected-on it is the very substantiality of the
organized forms of the flow. The unity of these virtual beings
is called the psychic life or psyche, a virtual and transcendent
in-itself which underlies the temporalization of the for-itself.
Pure reflection is never anything but a quasi-knowledge; but
there can be a reflective knowledge of the Psyche alone.
Naturally we will rediscover in each psychic object the
characteristics of the real reflected-on but degraded in the In-
itself. A brief a priori description of the Psyche will enable us
to account for this In-itself.
(1) By Psyche we understand the Ego, its states, its quali-
acts. The Ego with the double grammatical form
of “I” and “Me” represents our person as a transcendent psy-
chic unity. We have described it elsewhere. It is as the Ego
that we are. subjects in fact and subjects in theory, active and
passive, voluntary agents, possible objects of a judgment con-
cerning value of responsibility.
The qualities of the Ego represent the ensemble of vir-
tues, latent traits, potentialities which constitute our charac-
TEMPORALITY
227
ter and our habits (in the sense of the Greek 'eft- )• The Ego
is a “quality” of being angry, industrious, jealous, ambitious,
sensual, etc. But we must recognize also qualities of another
sort which have their origin in our history and which we call
acquired traits: I can be “showing my age," tired, bitter,
declining, progressing; I can appear as “having acquired as-
surance as the result of a success” or on the contrary as
“having little by little contracted the tastes, the habits, the
sexuality of an invalid” (following a long illness).
States — ^in contrast with qualities which exist “potentially”
— give themselves as actually existing. Hate, love, jealousy are
states. An illness, in so far as it is apprehended by the patient
as a psycho-physiological reality, is a state. In the same way a
number of characteristics which are externally attached to my
person can, in so far as I live them, become states. Absence
(in relation to a definite person), exile, dishonor, triumph are
states. We can see what distinguishes the quality from the
state: After my anger yesterday, my “irascibility” survives as a
simple latent disposition to become angry. On the contrary,
after Pierre’s action and the resentment which I felt because of
it, my hate -survives as an actual reality although my thought
may be currently occupied with another object A quality
furthermore is an innate or acquired disposition which con-
tributes to qualify my personality. The state, on the contrary,
is much more accidental and contingent; it is something
which happens to me. There exist however intermediates
between states and qualities: for example, the hatred of
Pozzo di Borgo for Napoleon, although existing in fact and
representing an affective, contingent relation between Pozzo
and Napoleon the First, was constitutive of the person Pozzo.
By acts we must understand the whole synthetic activity
of the person; that is, every disposition of means as related to
ends, not as the for-itself is its own possibilities but as the
act represents a transcendent psychic synthesis which the for-
itself must live. For example, the boxer’s training is an act
because it transcends and supports the For-itself, which more-
over realizes itself in and through this training. The same
goes for the re.<;earch of the scientist, for the work of the artist,
for the election campaign of the politician. In all these cases
the act as a psychic being represents a transcendent existence
and the objective aspect of the relation of the For-itself with
the world.
(2) The “Psychic” is given solely to a special category of
228 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
cognitive acts— the acts of the reflective For-itseif. On the
unreflective plane, in fact, the For-itself is its own possibilities
in the non-thetic mode; and since its possibilities are possible
presences to the world beyond the given state of the world,
what is revealed thetically but non-thematically across these
possibilities is a state of the world synthetically bound with
the given state. Consequently the modifications to be imposed
on the world are given thetically in present things as objective
potentialities which have to realize themselves by borrowing
our body as the instrument of their realization. It is thus that
the man who is angry sees on the face of his opponent the
objective quality of asking for a punch in the nose. Hence
we have such expressions as “itching to be spanked” or “ask-
ing for trouble,”i 2 Our body here is like a medium in a trance.
Through it must be realized a certain potentiality of things
(a beverage-about-to-be-drunk, aid-about-to-be-brought, dan-
gerous-animal-about-to-be-ldlled, etc.), and reflection arising
in the midst of all these apprehends the ontological relation
of the For-itself to its possibilities but as an object. Thus the
act rises as the virtual object of the reflective 'consciousness.
It is then impossible for me at the same time and on the same
level to be conscious of Pierre and of my friendship for him;
these two existences are always separated by the breadth of the
. For-itself. And this For-itself is a hidden reality; in the case
of consciousness not-reflected-on, the For-itself is, but non-thet-
ically, and it is effaced before the object in the world and its
potentialities. In the case of the reflective upsurge the for-itself
is surpassed toward the virtual object which the reflective has
to be. Only a pure reflective consciousness can discover the
For-itself reflected-on in its reality. We use the term Psyche
for the organized totality of these virtual and transcendent
e^stents which form a permanent cortege for impure reflec-
tion and which are the natural object of psychological XQSCcirch.
(3) The objects although virtual are not abstract; the
reflective does not aim at them in emptiness; they are given as
the concrete in-itself which the reflective has to be beyond the
Tr. The French expressions here have no close English equivalent. "Tete
<5 gifles is a head for slaps”; ’’menton gui attire les coups” is a ‘‘chin
which attracts blows.” Cf. Goneril’s taunt in King Lear:
‘‘Milk-liver’d man!
That bear st a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs.”
(IV.ii)
TEMPORALITY
229
reflected-on. We shall use the term evidence for the immediate
presence “in person” of hate, exile, systematic doubt in the
reflective For-itself. To be convinced that this presence exists,
it is enough to call to mind cases in our own personal experi-
ence when we have tried to recall a dead love or a certain in-
tellectual atmosphere which we had lived at an earlier date.
On such occasions we had plainly a consciousness of aiming
in emptiness at these various objects. We could form partic-
ular concepts of them, attempt a literary description of them,
but we knew that they were not there. Similarly there are
intermittent periods for a living love during which we know
that we love but we do not feel it. These “intermittences in
the heart” have been very well described by Proust. In con-
trast, it is possible to grasp a love in fullness, to contemplate
it. But for that is necessary a particular mode of being on the
part of the For-itself reflected-on. I can apprehend my friend-
ship for Pierre, but it is through my sympathy, which at the
moment has become the object reflected-on by a reflective con-
sciousness. In short, the only way to make-present these quali-
ties, these states, or these acts is to apprehend them across a
consciousness reflected-on of which they are the objectivation,
the shadow cast onto the in-itself.
But this possibility .of making-present a love proves better
than any argument the transcendence of the psychic. When I
abruptly discover, when I see my love, I apprehend at the
same stroke that it stands before my consciousness. I can take
points of view regarding it, can judge it; I am not engaged in
it as the reflective is in the reflected-on. Due to this very fact
I apprehend it as not being of the nature of the For-it-
self, It is infinitely heavier, more opaque, more solid than that
absolute transparency. That is why the evidence with which
Ae psychic gives itself to the intuition of impure reflection
IS not apodictic. There is a cleavage between the future of the
For-itself reflected-on, which is constantly eaten away and
lightened by my freedom, and the dense and menacing future
of my love, a cleavage which gives to it precisely its meaning
as love. If I did not apprehend in the psychic object a love
with its future arrested, would it still be love? Would it not
rather fall under the heading of caprice? And does not even
the caprice engage the future to the extent that it is given as
going to remain caprice and never to be changed into love?
Thus the always nihilated future of the For-itself prevents all
determination in itself within the For-itself as the For-itself
230
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
which loves or which hates; and the shadow projected by the
For-itself reflected-on possesses naturally a degraded future in
in-itself, one which forms an integral part of it in deter-
mining its meaning. But in correlation with the continual
nihilation of Futures reflected-on, the organized psychic
ensemble with its future remains only probable. And we
need not understand by that an external quality which would
come from a relation with my knowledge and which could
be transformed if need be into certainty, but rather an on-
tological characteristic.
(4) The psychic object, being the shadow cast by the
For-itself reflected-on, possesses in degraded form the charac-
teristics of consciousness. In particular it appears as an un-
achieved and probable totality there where the For-itself makes
itself exist in the diasporatic unity of a detotalized totality.
This means that the Psychic, apprehended across the three
ekstatic dimensions of temporality, appears as constituted by
the synthesis of a Past, a Present, and a Future. A love, an
enterprise is the organized unity of these three dimensions. In
fact it is not enough to say that a love “has” a future as if
the future were external to the object which it characterizes;
the future makes a part of the organized form of the flow of
“love,” for love is given its meaning as love by its being in the
future. But due to the fact that the psychic object is in-itself,
its present can not be flight, nor can its future be pure possi-
bility. In these forms of flow there is an essential priority of
the Past, which is what the For-itself ivo-r and which already
presupposes the transformation of the For-itself into In-itself.
The reflective projects a psychic object provided with the
three temporal dimensions, but it constitutes these three di-
mensions solely out of what the reflected-on was. The Future is
already; otherwise how could my love be love? Only it is not
yet given; it is “now” which is not yet revealed. It loses then
its character as a possibility which-l-hav e-to-be; my love, my
joy do not have to be their future, for they are it in the tran-
quil indifference of juxtaposition, just as this fountain pen is
at once a pen and — below — a cap. The Present similarly is
apprehended in its real quality of being-there. Only this
being-there is constituted in having been-there. The Present is
already wholly constituted and armed from head to foot; it
is a now” which the instant brings and carries away like a
costume ready made; it is a card which comes out of the game
and returns to it. The passage of a “now” from the future
TEMPORALITY
231
to the present and from the present to the past does not cause
it to undergo any modification since in any case, future or not,
is is already past. This fact is well illustrated by the na’ive way
in which psychologists take recourse in the unconscious in or-
der to distinguish the three “nows” of the psychic: they call
present the “now” which is present to the consciousness.
Those which have passed ■ into the future have exactly the
same characteristics, but they wait in the limbo of the uncon-
scious; and if we take them in that undifferentiated environ-
ment, it is impossible to distinguish past from future among
them. A memory which survives in the unconscious is a past
“now” and at the same time, inasmuch as it awaits being
evoked, it is a future “now.” Thus the psychic form is not
to-be; it is already made; it is already complete, past, present,
future, in the mode has been. The “nows” which compose it
have only to undergo one by one — before returning into the
past — ^the baptism of consciousness.
The result is that the psychic form contains two co-
existing contradictory modalities of being since it is already
made and appears in the cohesive unity of an organism and
since at the same time it can exist only through a succession
of “nows,” each one of which tends to be isolated in an in-
itself. Thus joy, for example, passes from one instant to an-
other because its future exists already as a terminal result and
the given meaning of its development, not as that which it
has to be, but as that which it “has been” already in the
future.
Actually this inner cohesion of the psyche is nothing other
Aan the unity of being of the For-itself hypostasized in the
in-itself. A hate has no parts; it is not a sum of attitudes and
of states of consciousness, but it gives itself through the
attitudes and states of consciousness as the temporal unity —
without parts — of their appearances. But the unity of being in
the For-itself is explained by the ekstatic character of its
being; it has to be in full spontaneity what it will be. The
psychic, on the contrary, “is made-to-be.” This means that it
is by itself incapable of determining itself in existence. It is
sustained in the face of the reflective by a sort of inertia; and
psychologists have often insisted on its “pathological” charac-
ter. It is in this sense that Descartes can speak of the “passions
of the soul.” Although the psychic is not on the same plane
of being as the existents of the world, this inertia enables tlie
psychic to be apprehended as related to these existents. A love
232
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
is given as “aroused” by the loved object. Consequently the
total cohesion of the psychic form becomes unintelligible since
it does not have to be this cohesion, since it is not its own
synthesis, since its unity has the character of a given. To the
extent that a hatred is a given succession of “nows,” all com-
pletely formed and inert, we find in it the germ of an infinite
divisibility. And yet this divisibility is disguised, denied in so
far as the psychic is the objectivation of the ontological unity
of the For-itself. Hence there is a sort of magic cohesion be-
tween the successive “nows” of the hatred,- which give them-
selves as parts only in order later to deny their exteriority.
The ambiguity is brought to light in Bergson’s theory of
the consciousness which endures and which is a “multiplicity
of interpenetration.” What Bergson is touching on here is the
psychic state, not consciousness conceived as For-iself. Actu-
ally what is the meaning of “interpenetration”? On the
theory of divisibility, it can not be absence. K there is to
be interpenetration, it is necessary that there be parts which
interpenetrate each other. But these parts, which theoretically
ought to fall back into their isolation, flow one into the other
by a magic and totally unexplained cohesion; and this total
fusion at present defies analysis. Bergson does not dream of
establishing this property of the psychic on an absolute struc-
Pf For-itself. He establishes it as a given, a simple
mtuition which reveals to hun that the psychic is an inte-
riorized multiplicity. Its character as something inert, as a pas-
sive datum is accentuated by the fact that it exists without
being for a consciousness, either tlietic or non-thetic. It is
without consciousness (of) being since in a natural attitude
man completely fails to recognize it and has to have recourse to
intumqn in order to apprehend it. Thus an object in the
world IS able to exist without being seen and to reveal itself
^ eventwhen we have forged the necessary instruments
to disclose It. The characteristics of psychic duration for Berg-
son are a pure contingent fact of experience; they are so be-
k so— that is all. Thus psychic temporality
, otu/n, closely akin to Bergson’s duration, which
intimate cohesion without effecting it, which is
f- ^ temporahzed without temporalizing itself, in which
a lona and magic interpenetration of elements that are
^ ^ ^kstatic relation of being can be compared
acting from a distance — an inter-
penetration which hides a multiplicity of already fbrmed
TEMPORALITY
233
“nows.” These characteristics do not result from any error on
the part of psychologists or from a lack of knowledge; they
are constitutive of psychic temporality, which is the hypostasis
of original temporality. The absolute unity of the psychic is
indeed the projection of the ontological, ekstatic unity of the
for-itself. But since this projection is made in the in-itself
which is what it is in the distanceless proximity of self-iden-
tity, the ekstatic unity parcels itself out in an infinity of
“nows” which are what they are and which, precisely for this
reason, tend to isolate themselves in their self-identity. Thus
participating simultaneously in the in-itself and in the for-
itself, psychic temporality conceals a contradiction which is
never overcome. This should not surprise us. Since psychic
temporality is the product of impure reflection, it is natural
that it is made-to-be what it is not and that it is not what it
is made-to-be. ^
Following this analysis we may now find more meaningful
an examination of the inter-relations of psychic forms at the
heart of psychic time. Let us note first of all that it is inter-
penetration which governs the connection between feelings,
for example, at the heart of a complex psychic form. Every-
body knows those feelings of aflFection “tinted” with envy,
those hates “penetrated” despite all by admiration, those
romantic friendships which novelists have often described.
There is certainly interpenetration as soon as we apprehend a
friendship tinted with envy like a cup of coffee clouded with
cream. Admittedly this comparison is gross. Nevertheless
it is certain that the amorous friendship is not given as a
simple specification of the genus friendship, as the isosceles
triangle is a specification of the genus triangle. The friendship
is given as wholly penetrated by total love, and yet it is not
love; it “does not make itself” love, for then it would lose its
autonomy as friendship- But it constitutes itself as an inert
object in-itself which language can scarcely name, where love,
autonomous and in-itself, is magically extended through all
&e friendship just as the foot is extended through all the sea
in the Stoic (Tvyyvo'is.
But psychic processes imply also the action from a distance
of^ prior forms on posterior forms. We cannot conceive of
this action at a distance in the mode of simple causality found,
for example, in classical mechanics, which supposes the totally
inert existence of a moving body enclosed in the instant.
“ Tr. Correction for Sartre's avyxutrif -
234 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Neither can we allow the mode of physical causality con-
ceived in the manner of John Stuart Mill, which is defined by
the constant and unconditioned succession of two states
where the being of each one is exclusive of the other. Inas-
much as the psychic is the objectivation of the for-itself, it
possesses a degraded spontaneity which is grasped as the in-
ternal, given quality of the form of the psychic and which
is inseparable from its cohesive force. This spontaneity can not
therefore be given strictly as produced by the prior form. But
on the other hand, neither can the spontaneity determine itself
in existence since it is apprehended only as one determination
among others of a given existent. It follows that the prior form
has to effect from a distance the birth of a form of the same
nature which is organized spontaneously as a form of flow. We
are not dealing here with being which has to be its future
and its past, but only with successions of past, present, and
future forms which all exist in the mode of “having-been,”
and which at a distance influence one another. This influ-
ence will be manifested either by penetration or by motiva-
tion. If it is by penetration, the reflective apprehends as a
single object two psychic objects which had at first been
given separately. The result is a new psychic object, each
characteristic of which will be the synthesis of the prior two,
though this object is unintelligible in itself and gives itself
simultaneously as all one and all the other without there being
any alteration in either. In motivation, on the contrary, the two
objects remain each at its own place. But since a psychic ob-
ject is an organized form and a multiplicity of interpenetra-
tion, it can act only simultaneously as one whole on another
whole object. The result is a total action at a distance by
means of a magic influence of one on the other. For example,
my humiliation of yesterday is the total motive for my mood
this morning, etc.
The fact that this action at a distance is totally magic and
irrational proves better than any analysis the futility of
attempts on the part of intellectualistic psychologists to re-
main on the level of the psychic and yet deduce this action to
an intelligible causality by means of an intellectual analysis.
It is thus that Proust by means of intellectualistic distinctions
is perpetually trying to find bonds of rational causality be-
^een psychic states in the temporal succession of these states.
But at the end of the analysis he can offer us only results such
as the following:
TEMPORALITY
235
As soon as Swann could picture (Odette) to himself with-
out revulsion, as soon as he thought again of the kindness
in her smile, and as soon as the desire to take her away
from everyone else was no longer added to his love by
jealousy, that love became again a taste for the sensa-
tions which Odette’s person gave him, for the pleasure
which he felt in admiring as a spectacle or in questioning
as a phenomenon the lifting up of one of her glances, the
formation of one of her smiles, the utterance of an in-
tonation of her voice. And this pleasure different from
all other had ended by creating in him a need of her,
which she alone could assuage by her presence or her
letters. . . . Thus by the very chemistry of his affliction,
after having created jealousy out of his love, he began to
manufacture tenderness, pity for Odette.^^
This passage is obviously concerned with the psychic.
We see feelings which, individualized and separated by na-
ture, are here acting one on the other. But Proust is trying to
clarify their actions and to classify them in the hope that he
may thereby make understandable the fluctuations which
Swann experiences. Proust does not limit himself to describing
the conclusions which he himself has been able to make (e.g.,
the transition through “oscillation” from hate-filled jealousy
to tender love); he wants to explain these findings.
What are the results of this analysis? Is the unintelligi-
bility of the psychic removed? It is easy to see that on the
contrary this somewhat arbitrary reduction of the great
psychic forms to more simple elements accentuates the magic
irrationality of the inter-relations which psychic objects sup-
port. How does jealousy “add” to love the “desire to take her
away from everyone else”? And how does this desire once
added to love (always the image of the cloud of cream
“added” to the coffee) prevent it from becoming again “a
taste for the sensations which Odette’s person gave him”?
And how can the pleasure create a need? And how does
love manufacture that jealousy which in return will add to
love the desire to take Odette away from everyone else? And
how, when freed from this desire, is it going to manufacture
tenderness anew? Proust here attempts to constitute a symbolic
chemistry, but the chemical images which he uses are
capable only of disguising the motivations and irrational acts.
'^*Du cdtS de chez Swann, 37® edition, 11, p. 82. My italics.
236 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
It is an attempt to draw us toward a mechanistic interpreta-
tion of the psychic which, without being any more intelligi-
ble, would completely distort its nature. And yet Proust can
not keep from showing us between the estranged states almost
interhuman relations (to create, to manufacture, to add),
which would almost allow us to suppose that these psychic
objects are animated agents. In his descriptions the intellec-
tualistic analysis shows its limitations at every instant; it can
effect its distinctions and its classifications only superficially
and on the basis of total irrationality. It is necessary to give up
trying to reduce the irrational element in psychic causality.
This causality is a degradation of the ekstatic for-itself, which
is its own being at a distance from itself, its degradation into
magic, into an in-itself which is what it is at its own place.
Magic action through influence at a distance is the necessary
result of this relaxation of the bonds of being. The psycholo-
gist must describe these irrational bonds and take them as an
original given of the psychic world.
Thus the reflective consciousness is constituted as con-
sciousness of duration, and hence psychic duration appears to
consciousness. This psychic temporality as a projection into
the in-itself of original temporality is a virtual being whose
phantom flow does not cease to accompany the ekstatic tem-
poralization of the for-itself in so far as this is apprehended
by reflection. But psychic temporality disappears completely
if the for-itself remains on the un-reflective level or if impure
reflection purifies itself. Psychic temporality is similar in this
respect to original temporality — in that it appears as a mode
of being of concrete objects and not as a limit or a pre-
established rule. Psychic time is only the connected bringing
together of temporal objects. But its essential difference from
original temporality is that it is while original temporality
temporalizes itself. As such psychic time can be constituted
only with the past, and the future can be only as a past which
will come after the present past; that is, the empty form be-
fore-after is hypostasized, and it orders the relations between
objects equally past.
At the same time this psychic duration which can not be
^ y itself must perpetually be made-to-be. Perpetually oscillat-
mg between the multiplicity of juxtaposition and the absolute
cohesion of the ekstatic for-itself, this temporality is composed
o nows which have been, which remain at the place which
as een assigned to them, but which influence each other
TEMPORALITY
237
at a distance in their totality; it is this which renders it com-
parable to the magic duration of Bergson’s philosophy. As
soon as we enter on the plane of impure reflection — ^that is,
of the reflection which seeks to determine the being which I
am — an entire world appears which peoples this temporality.
This world, a virtual presence, the probable object of my
reflective intention, is the psychic world or the psyche. In one
sense, its existence is purely ideal; in another it is, since it
is-made-to-be, since it is revealed to consciousness. It is “my
shadow”; it is what is revealed to me when I wish to see
myself. In addition, this phantom world exists as a real situa-
tion of the for-itself, for it can be that in terms of which
the for-itself determines itself to be what it has to be. For
example, I shall not go to this or that person’s house “because
of” the antipathy which I feel toward him. Or I decide on
this or that action by taking into consideration my hate or my
love. Or I refuse to discuss politics because I know my quick
temper and I can not risk becoming irritated. Along with
that transcendent world which is lodged in the infinite
becoming of pre-historic indifference there is constituted
precisely 'as a virtual unity of being that temporality which is
called “inner” or “qualitative,” which is the objectivation in
in-itself of original temporality. In this inner temporality we
find the first outline of an “outside”; the for-itself sees itself
almost as bestowing an outside on its own eyes, but this
outside is purely virtual. We shall see later how being-for-
others realizes the suggestion of this “outside.”
CHAPTER THREE
Transcendence
In order to arrive at as complete a description as possible
of the for-itself we chose as a guiding thread the exami-
nation of negative attitudes. As we have seen, all questions
which we can pose and the replies which can be made, to
them are conditioned by the permanent possibility of non-
being, outside us and vdthin. Our original goal, however,
was not only to discover the negative structures of the for-
itself. In the Introduction we encountered a problem, and it
is this problem which we have wished to resolve: what is
the original relation of human reality to the being of phenom-
ena or being-in-itself? In the Introduction indeed we were
obliged to reject both the realist solution and the idealist
solution. It appeared to us both that transcendent being could
not act on consciousness and that consciousness could not
construct the transcendent by objectivizing elements . bor-
rowed from its subjectivity. Consequently we concluded that
^ e original relation to being could not be an external rela-
unite two substances originally isolated,
e Relation of the ^ regions of being is a primitive up-
^rge, we said, “and it forms a part of the very structure of
ese emgs. The concrete is revealed to us as the synthetic
totality of which consciousness, like the phenomenon, con-
stitutes only the articulations.
238
TRANSCENDENCE
239
But although in one sense consciousness considered in iso-
lation is an abstraction, and although phenomena — even the
phenomenon of being — are similarly abstract in so far as
they cannot exist as phenomena without appearing to a con-
sciousness, nevertheless the being of phenomena as in an in-
itself which is what it is can not be considered as an abstrac-
tion. In order to be, it needs only itself; it refers only to it-
self. On the other hand, our description of the for-itself has
shown us how this, on the contrary, is removed as far as pos-
sible fropi a substance and from the in-itself; we have seen
that it is its own nothingness and that it can exist only in
the ontological unity of its ekstases. Therefore while the re-
lation of the for-itself to the in-itself is originally constitutive
of the very being which is put into the relation, we should not
understand that this relation is constitutive of the in-itself but
rather of the for-itself. It is in the for-itself alone that we
must look for the key to that relation to being which we
call, for example, knovdng. The for-itself is responsible in
its being for its relation with the in-itself, or if you prefer,
it produces itself originally on the foundation of a relation
to the in-itself. This is what we already anticipated when we
defined consciousness as “a being such that in its being,
its being is in question in so far as this being implies a
being other than itself.” But since formulating this defini-
tion we have acquired new knowledge. In particular we have
grasped the profound meaning of the for-itself as the foun-
dation of its own nothingness. Is it not time now to utilize
this knowledge to determine and explain that ekstatic rela-
tion of the for-itself to the in-itself on the foundation of
which knowing and acting in general can appear? Are we
not in a position now to reply to our origin^ question? In
order to be non-thetic self-consciousness, consciousness must
be a thetic consciousness of something, as we have noted.
But what we have studied hitherto is the for-itself as the
original mode of being of non-thetic self-consciousness. Are
we not therefore bound to describe the relations of the for-
itself with the in-itself inasmuch as these are constitutive of
the very being of the for-itself? Are we not able at present
to find the answer to questions of the following type: Since
the in-itself is what it is, how and why does the being of
the for-itself have to be a knowledge of the in-itself? And
what in general is knowledge?
240
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
I. KNOWLEDGE AS A TYPE OF RELATION
BETWEEN THE FOR-ITSELF AND THE
IN-rrSELF '
There is only intuitive knowledge. Deduction and discur-
sive argument, incorrectly called examples of knowing, are
only instruments which lead to intuition. When intuition
is reached, methods utilized to attain it are effaced before
it; in cases where it is not attained, reason and argument
remain as indicating signs which point toward an intuition
beyond reach; finally if it has been attained but is not a
present mode of my consciousness, the precepts which I use
remain as the results of operations formerly effected, like
what Descartes called the “memories of ideas.” If someone
asks for a definition of intuition, Husserl will reply, in agree-
ment with the majority of philosophers, that it is the pres-
ence of the thing {Sache) “in person” to consciousness.
Knowledge therefore is of the type of being which we de-
scribed in the preceding chapter under the title of “presence
to But we have established that the in-itself can
never ^ by itself be presence. Being-present, in fact, is an
ekstatic mode of being of the for-itself. We are then com-
pelled to reverse the terms of our definition: intuition is the
presence of consciousness to the thing. Therefore we must
return now to the problem of the nature and the meaning
of this presence of the for-itself to being.
In the Introduetion while using the still not elucidated
concept of consciousness,” we established the necessity for
consciousness to be consciousness of something. In fact it is
by means of &at of which it is conscious that consciousness
distinguishes itself in its own eyes and that it can be self"
consciousness; a wnsciousness which would not be conscious-
ness (of) something would be consciousness (of) nothing. But
at present we have elucidated the ontological meaning of con-
sciousness or the for-itself. We can therefore pose the prob-
em m more precise terms and ask: What do we mean when
we say that it is necessary for consciousness to-be-conscious-
ness of something — considered on the ontological level; i.e.,
in the perspective of being-for-itself?
We know that the for-itself is the foundation of its own
no gness m the form of the phantom dyad — ^the reflec-
lon re ectmg. The reflecting exists only in order to re-
TRANSCENDENCE
241
fleet the reflection, and the reflection is a reflection only in
so far as it refers to the reflecting. Thus the two terms out-
lined in the dyad point to each other, and each engages its
being in the being of the other. But if the reflecting is
nothing other than the reflecting of this reflection, and if
the reflection can be characterized only by its “being-in-
order-to-be-reflected in this reflecting,” then the two terms
of the quasi-dyad support their two nothingnesses on each
other, conjointly annihilating themselves. It is necessary
that the reflecting reflect something in order that the en-
semble should not dissolve into nothing. But if the reflec-
tion, on the other hand, were something, independent of
its being-in-order-to-be-reflected, then it would necessar-
ily be qualified not as a reflection but as an in-itself. This
would be to introduce opacity into the system “reflec-
tion-reflecting” and, even more, to complete the suggested
scissiparity. For in the for-itself the reflection is also the
reflecting. But if the reflection is qualified, it is separated
from the reflecting and its appearance is separated from
its reality; the cogito becomes impossible. The reflection
can be simultaneously “something to be reflected” and noth-
ing, but only if it makes itself qualified by something
other than itself or, if you prefer, if it is reflected as a re-
lation to an outside which it is not.
What defines the reflection for the reflecting is always
that to -which it is presence. Even a joy, apprehended on
the unreflective level, is only the “reflected” presence to
a laughing and open world full of happy perspectives.
But the few preceding comments have already informed us
that non-being is an essential structure of presence. Pres-
ence encloses a radical negation as presence to that which
one is not. What is present to me is what is not me. We
should note furthermore that this “non-being” is implied
a priori in every theory of knowledge. It is impossible
to construct the notion of an object if we do not have orig-
inally a negative relation designating the object as that
which is not consciousness. This is what made it quite easy
to use the expression “non-ego,” which was the fashion
for a time, although one could not detect on the part of
those who employed it the slightest concern to found this
“not” which originally qualified the external world. Actu-
ally neither the connection of -jepresentation, nor the nec-
essity of certain subjective ensembles, nor temporal irrevers-
242
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ibility, nor an appeal to infinity could serve to constitute
the object as such (that is, to serve as foundation for a
further negation which would separate out the non-ego and
oppose it to me as such) if this negation were not given
first and if it were' not the a priori foundation of all ex-
perience.
The thing, before all comparison, before all construction,
is that which is present to consciousness as not being con-
sciousness. The original relation of presence as tlic founda-
tion of knowledge is negath'e. But as negation comes to the
world by means of tlic for-itsclf, and as the thing is what
it is in tlie absolute indifference of identity, it can not
be tlie thing which is posited as not being the for-itself.
Negation comes from the for-itsclf. We should not con-
ceive this negation as a type of judgment which would bear
on the thing itself and deny concerning it that it is the
for-itself; this type of negation could be conceived only if
the for-itself were a substance already fully formed, and
even in that case it could emanate only ns a third being
establishing from outside a negative relation between two
beings. But by the original negation the for-itself con-
stitutes itself as not being the thing. Consequently the defini-
tion of consciousness which we gave earlier can be formu-
lated in ffie perspective of the for-itsclf as follows: “The
for-itself is a being such that in its being, its being is in
question in so far as this being is essentially a certain way
not being a being which it posits simultaneously as other
than itself.” ^
^ Knowledge appears then as a mode of being. Knowing
IS neither a relation established after the event between
o beings, nor is it an activity of one of these two beings,
nor is It a quality of a property or a virtue. It is Uie very
emg o the for-itself in so far as this is presence to ;
toat IS, m so far as the for-itsclf has to be its being by
pnt Tu- ^ ^ ^ certain being to which it is pres-
means that the for-itself can be only in the mode
causing itself to be reflected as not
i^ tLVn f !! “something” which must qual-
m order that the dyad “reflection-reflecting”
flecL? °°^^“eooss is pure negation. The re-
beintr nc ^ J^o be^ qualified outside next to a certain
bv ‘Ho i^eing. This is precisely what we mean
by to be consciousness of something.”
TRANSCENDENCE
243
But we must define more precisely what we understand
by this original negation. Actually we should distinguish
two types of negation: external negation and internal ne-
gation. The first appears as a purely external bond estab-
lished between two beings by a witness. When I say, for
example, “A cup is not an inkwell,” it is very evident that
the foundation of this negation is neither in the cup nor
in the inkwell.^ Both of these objects are what they are,
and that is all. The negation stands as a categorical and
ideal connection which I establish between them without
modifying them in any way whatsoever, without enrich-
ing them or impoverishing them with the slightest quality;
they are not even ever so slightly grazed by this negative syn-
thesis. As it serves neither to enrich them nor to consti-
tute them, it remains strictly external. But we can already
guess the meaning of the other type of negation if we
consider such expressions as “I am not rich” or “I am not
handsome.” Pronounced with a certain melancholy, they do
not mean only that the speaker is denied a certain quality
but that the denial itself comes to influence the inner
structure of the positive being who has been denied the
quality. When I say, *T am not handsome,” I do not limit
myself to denying, with respect to myself taken as wholly
concrete, a certain virtue which due to this fact passes in-
to nothingness while I keep intact the positive totality of
my being (as when I say, “The vase is not white, it is
gray” — “The inkwell is not on the table, it is on the man-
telpiece”). I intend to indicate that “not being handsome”
is a certain negative virtue of my being. It characterizes
me within; as negative it is a real quality of myself —
that of not being handsome — and this negative quality
wUl explain my melancholy as well as, for example, my
failures in the world.
By an internal negation we understand such a relation
between two beings that the one which is denied to the
other qualifies the other at the heart of its essence — by
absence. The negation becomes then a bond of essentid
being since at least one of the beings on which it depends
IS such that it points toward the other, that it carries the
other in its heart as an absence. Nevertheless it is clear
*Tr. Sartre’s text reads “the foundation of this negation is neither in
the table nor in the inkwell.” The “table” is surely an error.
244
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
that this type of negation can not be applied to being-in-
itself. By nature it belongs to the for-itself. Only the for-
itself can be determined in its being by a being which it is
not. And if the internal negation can appear in the world —
as when we say of a pearl that it is false, of a fruit that
it is not ripe, of an egg that it is not fresh, etc . — ^it is by
the for-itself that it comes into the world — like negation in
general. Knowing belongs to the for-itself alone, for the
reason that only the for-itself can appear to itself as not being
what it knows. And as here appearance and being are one —
since the for-itself has to be its appearance — we must con-
clude that the for-itself includes within its being the being of
the object which it is not inasmuch as the for-itself puts its
own being into question as not being the being of the object
Here we must rid ourselves of an illusion which may be
formulated as follows: in order to constitute myself as not
being a particular being, I must have ahead of time in some
manner or other a knowledge of this being; for I can not judge
the differences between myself and a being of which I know
nothing. It is true, of course, that in our empirical existence
we can not know how we differ from a Japanese or an English-
man, from a worker or an employer until we have some notion
of these different beings. But these empirical distinctions can
not serve as a basis for us here, for we are undertaking the
study of an ontological relation which must render all ex-
perience possible and which aims at establishing how in gen-
eral an object can exist for consciousness. It is not possible
then for me to have any experience of an object as an
object which is not me until I constitute it is as an object.
On the contrary, what makes all ejqjerience possible is an fl
priori upsurge of the object for the subject — or since the
upsurge is the original fact of the for-itself, an original up-
surge of the for-itself as presence to the object which it is
not. What we should do then is to invert the terms of the pre-
ceding formula and formulate it thus: the fundamental relation
by which the for-itself has to be as not being this particular
object to which it is present is the foundation of all knowl-
e ge of this being. But we must describe this primary relation
m(^ exactly if we want to make it understandable.
remaining in the statement of the in- ,
* ^ illusion denounced in the preceding paragraph
IS e o servation that I can not determine myself not to be
TRANSCENDENCE
245
an object which is originally severed from all connection with
me. I can not deny that I am a particular being if I am a? a
distance from that being. K I conceive of a being entirely
closed in on itself, this being in itself will be solely that which
it is, and due to this fact there will be no room in it for
either negation or knowledge. It is in fact in terms of the
being which it is not that a being can make known to itself
what it is not. This means in the case of an internal nega-
tion that it is within and upon the being which it is not that
the for-itself appears as not being what it is not. In this sense
the internal negation is a concrete ontological bond. We are
not dealing here with one of those empirical negations in
which the qualities denied are distinguished first by their
absence or even by their non-being. In the internal negation
the for-itself collapses on what it denies. The qualities denied
are -precisely those to which the for-itself is most present; it.
is from them that it derives its negative force and perpetually
renews it. In this sense it is necessary to see the denied qualities
as a constitutive factor of the being of the for-itself, for the
for-itself must be there outside itself upon them; it must be
they in order to deny that it is they. In short the term-of-
brigin of the internal negation is the in-itself, the thing which
is there, and outside of it there is nothing except an emptiness,
a nothingness which is distinguished from the thing only by
a pure negation for which this thing furnishes the very content.
The difiSculty encountered by materialism in deriving knowl-
edge from the object stems from the fact that materialism
wants to produce a substance in terms of another substance.
But this dfficulty can not hinder us, for we aflarm that
there is nothing outside the in-itself except a reflection (re-
flst) of that nothing which is itself polarized and defined by
the in-itself inasmuch as it is precisely the nothingness of
this in-itself, the individualized nothing which is nothing
only because it is not the in-itself. Thus in this ekstatic relation
which is constitutive of the internal negation and of knowl-
edge, it is the in-itself “in person” which is the concrete pole
in its plenitude, and the for-itself is nothing other than the
emptiness in which the in-itself is detached.
^ The for-itself is outside itself in the in-itself since it causes
to be defined by what it is not; the first bond between
&e in-itself and the -for-itself is therefore a bond of being.
But this bond is neither a lack nor an absence. In the case
of absence indeed I make myself determined by a being which
246
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
I am not and which does not exist or which is not there; that
is, what determines me is like a hollow in the middle of what
I shall call my empirical plenitude. On the other hand, in
knowledge, taken as a bond of ontological being, the being
which I am not represents the absolute plenitude of the in-
itself. And I, on the contrary, am the nothingness, the ab-
sence which determines itself in existence from the stand-
point of this fullness. This means that in that type of being
which we call knowing, the only being which can be en-
countered and which is perpetually there is the known. The
knower is not; he is not apprehensible. He is nothing other
than that which brings it about that there is a being-there on
the part of the known, a presence — ^for by itself the known
is neither present nor absent, it simply is. But this presence
of the known is presence to nothing, since the knower is the
pure reflection of a non-being; the presence appears then
across the total translucency of the knower known, an abso-
lute presence.
A psychological and empirical exemplification of this
original relation is furnished us in the case of fascination.
In fascination, which represents the immediate fact of know-
ing, the knower is absolutely nothing but a pure negation;
he does not find or recover himself anywhere — ^he is not. The
only qualification which he can support is that he is not pre-
cisely this particular fascinating object. In fascination there
is nothing more than a gigantic object in a desert world. Yet
the fascinated intuition is in no way a fusion with the object.
In fact the condition necessary for the existence of fascination
is that the object be raised in absolute relief on a background
of emptiness; that is, I am precisely the immediate negatioU'-
of the object and nothing but that
We find this same pure negation at the basis of those pan-
theistic intuitions which Rousseau has several times described
^ concrete psychic events in his history. He claims that on
those occasions he melted into the universe, that the world
alone was suddenly found present as an absolute presence and
unconditioned totality. And certainly we can understand this
total, isolated presence of the world, its pure “being-there”;
certainly we admit freely that at this privileged moment there
was nothing else but the world. But this does not mean, as
ousseau claims, that there was a fusion of consciousness
world Such a fusion would signify the solidification
e or-itself in in-itself, and at the same stroke, the dis-
TRANSCENDENCE
247
appearance of the world and of the in-itself as presence. It is
true that in the pantheistic intention there is no longer any-
thing but the world — save for that which causes the in-itself
to be present as the world; that is, a pure negation which
is a non-thetic self-consciousness as negation. Precisely because
knowledge is not absence but presence, there is nothing which
separates the knower from the known.
Intuition has often been defined as the immediate presence
of the known to the knower, but it is seldom that anyone
has reflected on the requirements of the notion of the im-
mediate, Immediacy is the absence of any mediator; that is
obvious, for otherwise the mediator alone would be known
and not what is mediated. But if we can not posit any inter-
mediary, we must at the same time reject both continuity and
discontinuity as a type of presence of the knower to the
known. In fact we shall not admit that there is any continuity
of the knower with the known, for it supposes an intermediary
term which would be at once knower and known, which sup-
presses the autonomy of the knower in the face of the
known while engaging the being of the knower in the being of
the known. Then the structure of the object disappears since
the object must be absolutely denied by the for-itself as the
being of the for-itself. But neither can we consider the
original relation of the for-itself to the in-itself as a relation
of discontinuity. To be sure, the separation between two
discontinuous elements is an emptiness — i.e., a nothing — ^but
it is a realized nothing — i.e., in-itself. This substantialized
nothing is as such a non-conductive density; it destroys the
immediacy of presence, for it has qua nothing become some-
thing. The presence of the for-itself to the ha-itself can be
expressed neither in terms of continuity nor in terms of dis-
continuity, for it is pure denied identity.
To make this clearer, let us employ a comparison. When
two curves are tangential to one another, they offer a type
of presence without intermediaries. Nevertheless the eye
grasps only a single line for the length of their tangency.
Moreover if the two curves were hidden so that one could
see only the length A B where they are tangential to each
other, it would be impossible to distinguish them. Actually
what separates them is nothing; there is neither continuity nor _
discontinuity but pure identity. Now suddenly uncover the
two figures and we apprehend them once again as being two
throughout all their length. This situation derives not from an
248
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
abrupt factual separation which would suddenly be realized
between them but from the fact that the two movements
by which we draw the two curves so as to perceive them in-
clude each one a negation as a constituting act. Thus what
separates the two curves at the very spot of their tangency
is nothing, not even a distance; it is a pure negativity as the
counterpart of a constituting synthesis. Such an image will
enable us to understand better the relation of immediacy which
originally unites tlie knower to the known.
Ordinarily indeed it happens that a negation depends on
a “something” which exists before the negation and consti-
tutes its matter. For example, if I say that the inkwell is not
the table, then table and inkwell are objects already consti-
tuted whose being in-itself will be the support of the nega-
tive judgment. But in the case of the relation “knower-
known,” there is nothing on the side of the knower which
can provide a support for the negation; no difference, no
principle of distinction “is there” to separate in-itself the
knower from the known. But in the total indistinction of
being, there is nothing but a negation which does not even
exist but which has to be, which does not even posit itself
as a negation. Consequently knowledge and finally the know-
er himself are nothing except the fact “that there is” being,
that being in-itself gives itself and raises itself in relief on
the ground of this nothing. In this sense we can call knowl-
edge the pure solitude of the known. It is enough to say
that the original phenomenon of knowledge adds nothing
to being and creates nothing. It does not enrich being, for
knowledge is pure negativity. It only brings it about that
there is being. But this fact “that there is” being is not an
inner^ determination of being — which is what it is — but of
negativity. In this sense every revelation of a positive char-
acteristic of being is the counterpart of an ontological deter-
mination as pure negativity in the being of the for-itself.
For example, as we shall see later, the revelation of the
spatiality of being is one with the non-positional apprehension
by the for-itself of itself as unextended. And the unextended
character of the for-itself is not a positive, mysterious
virtue of spirituality which is hiding under a negative
denomination; it is a natural ekstatic relation, for it is
by and in the extension of the transcendent in-itself that
e or-itself makes itself known to itself and realizes its own
non-extension. The for-itself can not be first uhextended in
TRANSCENDENCE
249
order later to enter into relation with an extended being, for
no matter how we consider it, the concept of the unextended
makes no sense by itself; it is nothing but the negation of
the extended. If we could suppress — ^to imagine an impos-
sibility — ^the extension of the revealed determinations of the
in-itself, then the for-itself would remain aspatial; it would
be neither extended nor unextended, and it could not pos-
sibly be characterized in any way whatsoever so far as ex-
tension is concerned. In this sense extension is a transcen-
dent determination which the for-itself has to apprehend
to the exact degree that it denies itself as extended. That is
why the term which seems best to indicate this inner rela-
tion between knowing and being is the word realize, which
we used earlier in its double ontological and gnostic mean-
ing. I realize a project in so far as I give it being, but I also
realize my situation in so far as 1 live it and make it be with
my being. I “realize” the scope of a catastrophe, the difii-
cidty of an undertaking. To know is to realize in both senses
of the term. It is to cause being “to be there” while having
to be the reflected negation of this being. The real is realiza-
tion, We shall define transcendence as that inner and
realizing negation which reveals the in-itself while deter-
mining the being of the for-itself.
n. DETERMINATION AS NEGATION
To what being is the for-itself presence? Let us note imme- -
diately that the question is badly phrased. Being is what it
is; it can not possess in itself the determination “this one”
to answer the question “which?” In short the question has
meaning only if it is posited in a world. Consequently the
for-itself can not be present to this being rather than to
that since it is the presence of the for-itself which causes
the existence of a “this” rather than a “that.” Our exam-
ples, however, have shown us a for-itself denying concrete-
ly that it is a particular being. This situation arises from the
fact that we described the relation of knowledge before
bringing to light its structure of negativity. In this sense,
by the very fact that it was revealed in examples, that nega-
tivity was already secondary. Negativity as original tran-
scendence is not determined m terms of a this; it causes a
this to exist.
250
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
The original presence of the for-itself is presence to be-
ing. Shall we say then that it is presence to all being? That
would be to fall back into our former error. For totality can
come to being only by the for-itself. A totality indeed sup-
poses an internal relation of being between the terms of a
quasi-multiplicity in the same way that a multiplicity sup-
poses — in order to be this multiplicity — an inner totalizing
relation among its elements. In this sense addition itself is a
synthetic act. Totality can come to beings only by a being
which has to be its own totality in their presence. This is
precisely the case with the for-itself, a detotalized totality
which temporalizes itself in a perpetual incompleteness. It
is the for-itself in its presence to being which causes there
to be an all of being. We must understand indeed that this
partieular being can be called this only on the ground of the
presence of all being. That does not mean that one being
needs all being in order to exist but that the for-itself realiz-
es itself as a realizing presence to this being on the original
ground of a realizing presence to all. But conversely smce
totality is an internal ontological relation of “thises,” it can
be revealed only in and through the individual “thises.”
That means that the for-itself as a realizing presence to all
being realizes itself as a realizing presence to the “thises,”
and as a realizing presence to the “thises” it realizes itself
as a realizing presence to all being. In other words, the pres-
ence of the for-itself to the world can be realized only by
its presence to one or several particular things, and converse-
ly its presence to a particular thing can be realized only on
the ground of a presence to the world. Perception is articu-
lated only on the ontological foundation of presence to the
world, and the world is revealed concretely as the ground of
each individual perception. It remains to explain how the
upsurge of the for-itself in being can bring it about that
there is an all and “thises.”
The presence of the for-itself to being as totality comes
from the fact that the for-itself has to be — ^in the mode of
being what it is not and of not being what it is — its own
totality as a detotalized totality. In so far as the for-itself
makes itself be in the unity of a single upsurge as all which
is not being, being stands before it as 'all which the for-
itself is not. The original negation, in fact, is a radical ne-
gation. T^e for-itself, which stands before being as its own
totality, is itself the whole of the negation and hence is the
TRANSCENDENCE
251
negation of the whole. Thus the achieved totality of the
world is revealed as constitutive of the being of the un-
achieved totality by which the being of totality comes into
being. It is through the world that the for-itself makes it-
self known to itself as a totality detotalized, which means
that by its very^ upsurge the for-itself is a revelation of being
as a totality inasmuch as the for-itself has to be its own to-
tality in the detotalized mode. Thus the very meaning of
the for-itself is outside in being, but it is through the for-
itself that the meaning of being appears. This totalization
of being adds nothing to being; it is nothing but the man-
ner in which being is revealed as not being the for-itself,
the manner in which there is being. It appears outside the
for-itself, beyond all reach, as that which determines the
for-itself in its being. But the fact of revealing being as a
totality does not touch being any more than the fact of
counting two cups on the table touches the existence or na-
ture of either of them. Yet it is not a purely subjective mod-
ification of the for-itself since it causes all subjectivity to be
possible. But if the for-itself is to be the nothingness where-
by “there is” being, then being can exist originally only as
totality. Thus knowledge is the world. To use Heidegger’s
expression, the world and outside of that — nothing. But
this “nothing” is not originally that in which human re-
ality emerges. This nothing is human reality itself as the
radical negation by means of which the world is revealed.
Of course the very apprehension of the world as totality
causes the appearance alongside the world of a nothingness
which sustains and encompasses this totality. In fact this
nothingness as the absolute nothing which is left outside
the totality even determines the totality. This is why the
totalization adds nothing to being, for it is only the result
of the appearance of nothingness as the limit of being. But
this nothingness is not anything except human reality ap-
prehending itself as excluded from being and perpetually
beyond being, in commerce with nothing. It amounts to the
same thing whether we say, human reality is that by which
heing is revealed as totality — or, human reality is that which
causes there to be nothing outside of being. This nothing
IS the possibility for there to be a beyond-the-world such
fhat (1) this possibility reveals being as a world and (2)
human reality has to be this possibility. As such, this noth-
252
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ing constitutes — along with the original presence to being —
the circuit of selfness.
But human reality makes itself the unachieved totality of
negations only in so far as it reaches beyond a concrete ne-
gation which it has to be as actual presence to being. If it
were in fact a pure consciousness (of) being a syncretic and
undifferentiated negation, it could not determine itself and
therefore could not be a concrete totality, although detotal-
ized, of its determinations. It is a totality only to the extent
that through all its other negations it escapes the concrete
negation which it is at present. Its being can be its own
totality only to the extent that it is a surpassing toward the
whole which it has to be, beyond the partial structure which
it is. Otherwise it would simply be what it is and could in
no way be considered as either a totality or a non-totality.
In the sense then that a partial negative structure must ap-
pear on the ground of the undifferentiated negations which
I am-— and of which it forms a part — ^I make known to my-
self by means of being-in-itself a certain concrete reality
which I have to not-be. The “this” is the being which I at
present am not, in so far as it appears on the ground of
the totality of being. This is what I at present am not inas-
much as I have to be nothing of being: it is what is re-
vealed on the undifferentiated ground of being, to make
imown to me the concrete negation which I have to be on
the totalizing ground of my negations.
This original relation between the all and the “this” is at
s^rce of the relation between figure and ground which
me Gestalt theory” has brought to light. The “this” always
appears on a ground; that is, on the undifferentiated totality
of bemg inasmuch as the For-itself is the radical and syn-
thfo ^ always dissolve again into
tos undifferentiated totality when anotoer “this” arises.
trrnnnrf of the “this” or of the figure on the
own rn Correlate of the appearance of my
syncretic ground of a radical
eatinn nr ^ ^
beinp-” I am it in toe mode of “non-
deed onlv in tV ^ ^ mode of being. It is in-
on me CToiinri present negation will appear
wL indS it is. omer-
or else it wonlrJ negation would be entirely cut off
else It would be dissolved in toe radical negation. The
TRANSCENDENCE
253
appearance of the this on the all is correlative with a cer-
tain way which the For-itself has of being the negation of
itself. There is a this because I am not yet my future nega-
tions and because I am no longer my past negations. The
revelation of the this supposes that the “accent is put” on
a certain negation accompanied by the withdrawal of the
others in the syncretic disappearance into the ground; that
is, that the for-itself can exist only as a negation which is
constituted on the withdrawal into totality of the radical
negativity. The For-itself is not the world, spatiality, perma-
nence, matter, in short the in-itself in general, but its man-
ner of not-being-them is to have to not-be this table, this
glass, this room on the total ground of negativity. The this
supposes then a negation of the negation — but a negation
which has to be the radical negation which it denies, which
does not cease reattaching itself to it by an ontological thread,
and which remains ready to dissolve in the radical negation
at the upsurge of another “this.” In this sense the “this” is
revealed as “this” by “a withdrawal into the ground of the
world” on -the part of all the other “thises”; its determina-
tion, which is the origin of all determinations, is a nega-
tion.
We must understand that this negation — seen from the
point of view of the “this” — ^is wholly ideal. It adds noth-
ing to being and subtracts nothing from it. The being con-
fronted as “this” is what it is and does not cease being it;
It does not become. As such it can not be outside of itself
in the whole as a structure of the whole, nor can it be out-
side of itself in the whole so as to deny its identity with
the whole. Negation can come to the this only through a
being which has to be simultaneously presence to the whole
of being and to the this — that is, through an ekstatic being.
Since it leaves the this intact as being in itself, since it does
not effect a real synthesis of all the thises in totality, the
negation constitutive of the this is a negation of the external
type; the relation of the “this” to the whole is a relation of
externality. Thus we see that determination appears as an
external negation correlative with the radical and ekstatic in-
ternal negation which I am. This is the explanation of the
ambiguous character of the world, which is revealed simul-
taneously as a synthetic totality and as a purely additive col-
lection of all the “thises.” In so far as the world is a totality
which is revealed as that on which the For-itself has to be
254
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
radically its own nothingness, the world is presented as a
syncretism of undifferentiation. But in so far as this radical
nihilation is always beyond a concrete and present nihila-
tion, the world appears always ready to open like a box to
allow the appearance of one or several “thises” which al-
ready were (there in the heart of the undifferentiation of
the ground) what they are now as a differentiated figure.
When we are gradually approaching a landscape which was
given in great masses, we see objects appear which are given
as having been there already, as elements in a discontinuous
collection of “thises”; in the same way, in the ‘ experiments
of the Gestalt school, the continuous background suddenly
when apprehended as figure bursts into a multiplicity of
discontinuous elements. Thus the world, as the correlate of
a detotalized totality, appears as an evanescent totality in
the sense that it is never a real synthesis but an ideal limita-
tion — by nothing — of a collection of thises.
Thus the continuous as a formal quality of the ground
allows the discontinuous to appear as a type of external re-
lation between the this and the totality. It is precisely this
perpetual evanescence of the totality into collection, of the
continuous into the discontinuous that defines space. Space
can not be a being. It is a moving relation between beings
which are unrelated. It is the total independence of the in-
itselfs, as it is revealed to a being which is presence to “all”
the in-itself as the independence of each one in relation to
the others. It is the unique way in which beings can be
revealed as having no relation, can be thus revealed to the
being through which relation comes into the world; that is,
space IS pure exteriority. Since this exteriority cannot belong
to any one of the thises considered and since in addition a
purely local negativity is self-destructive, it can neither be
y Itself nor be made-to-be.” The spatializing being is the
Bor-itself as co-present to the whole and to the “this.” Space
if ^.4 world, but it is the instability of the world appre-
hended as totality, inasmuch.^ as the world can always disin-
tegrate into external multiplicity. Space is neither the ground
nor e gure but the ideality of the ground inasmuch as it
an a ways d^inte^ate into figures; it is neither the con-
discontuiuous, but the permanent passage -
• muous to discontinuous. The existence of space
^ by causing being “to be there”
ing to being. Space is the ideality of the synthe-
TRANSCENDENCE
255
sis. In this sense it is at once totality to the extent that it
derives its origin from the world, and at the same time
nothing inasmuch as it results in the pullulation of the
thises. Space does not allow itself to be apprehended by
concrete intuition for it is not, but it is continuously spa-
tialized. It depends on temporality and appears in tempo-
rality since it can come into the world only through a being
whose mode of being is temporalization; for space is the
way in which this being loses itself ekstatically in order to
realize being. The spatial characteristic of the this is not
added synthetically io the this but is only the “place” of the
this; that is, its relation of exteriority to the ground inas-
much as this relation can collapse into a multiplicity of ex-
ternal relations with other thises when the ground itself
disintegrates into a multiplicity of figures. In this sense it
would be useless to conceive of space as a form imposed on
phenomena by the a priori structure of our sensibility.
Space can not be a form, for it is nothing; it is, on the con-
trary, the indication that nothing except the negation — and
this still as a type of external relation which leaves intact
what it unites — can come to the in-itself through the For-
itself. As for the For-itself, if it is not space, this is because
it apprehends itself precisely as not being being-in-itself in
so far as the in-itself is revealed to it in the mode of exteri-
ority which we call extension. It is precisely by denying
exteriority in itself and apprehending itself as ekstatic that
the For-itself spatializes space. The relation between the For-
itself and the in-itself is not one of juxtaposition or indif-
ferent exteriority. Its relation with the in-itself, which is the
foundation of all relations, is the internal negation, and it is
through this that being-in-itself continues in indifferent ex-
teriority in relation to other beings existing in a world. When
the exteriority of indifference is hypostasized as a substance
existing in and through itself — which can be effected only
at a lower stage of knowledge — it is made the object of a
type of particular study under the title of geometry and be-
comes a pure specification of the abstract theory of multi-
plicities.
It remains to determine what type of being the external
negation possesses since this comes to the world by the For-
itself. We know that it does not belong to the this. This
newspaper does not deny concerning itself that it is the
table on which it is lying; for in that case the -newspaper
256 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
would be ekstatically outside itself and in the table which
it denies, and its relation to the table would be an internal
negation; it would thereby cease even to be in-itself and
would become for-itself. The determinative relation of the
this therefore can belong neither to the this nor to the that’,
it enfolds them without touching them, without conferring
on them the slightest trace of new character; it leaves them
for what they are. In this sense we can modify the famous
statement of Spinoza, "Omnis determinatio est negatio,”
which Hegel declared to possess infinite riches; and we will
claim rather that every determination which does not belong
to the being which has to be its own determinations is an
ideal negation. Moreover it would be inconceivable that it
should be otherwise. Even if following an empirical-critical
psychologism, we were to consider things as purely subjec-
tive contents, we still could not conceive that the subject
would realize internal synthetic negations among these con-
tents without being them in a radical ekstatic immanence
which would remove all hope of any passage to objectivity.
With even more reason we can not imagine that the For-
itself effects distorting synthetic negations among transcen-
dents which it is not. In this sense the external negation
constitutive of the “this” can not appear as an objective
characteristic of the thing, if we understand by objective
that which by nature belongs to the in-itself — or that which
in one way or another really constitutes the object as it is.
But we must not conclude from this that the external nega-
tion has subjective existence like the pure mode of being of
the For-itself. The type of existence of the For-itself is a
pure internal negation; the existence in it of- an external
negation- would be destructive of its very existence. Conse-
quently the external negation can not be a way of disposing
and of classifying phenomena which would exist only as
subjective phantoms, nor can it “subjectiyize”- being in so
far as its revelation is constitutive of the For-itself. Its very
exteriority therefore requires that it remain “in the air,” ex-
tenor to the For-itself as well as to the In-itself. On the
other hand, precisely because it is exteriority, it can not be
y Itself, It refuses all supports, it is by nature Unselbstdndig,
and yet it can not be referred ^to any substance. It is a noth-
ing. In fact it is because the inkwell is not the table — ^nor
apprehend it as an ink-
. And yet if I say, “The inkwell is not the table,” I am
TRANSCENDENCE
257
thinking nothing. Thus determination is a nothing which
does not belong as an internal structure either to the thing
or to consciousness, but its being is to-be-summoned by the
For-itseif , across a system of internal negations in which the
in-itself is revealed in its indifference to all that is not itself.
In so far as the For-itself makes itself known to itself by the
In-itself, which it is not — in the mode of internal negation,
the indifference of the In-itself as the indifference which the
For-itself has to not-be is revealed in the world as determi-
nation.
m. QUALITY AND QUANTITY,
POTENTIALITY, INSTRUMENTALITY
Quality is nothing other than the being of the this when
it is considered apart from all external relation with the
world or with other thises. Too often quality has been con-
ceived as a simple subjective determination, and its quality-
of-being has then been confused with the subjectivity of the
psychic. The problem has then appeared to be especially to
explain the constitution of an object-pole conceived as the
transcendent unity of qualities. We have shown that this
problem is' insoluble. A quality does not objectivate itself if
it is subjective. Supposing that we had projected the unity
of an object-pole Beyond qualities, at most each one of them
would be ^ven directly as the subjective effect of the action
of things upon us. But the yellow of the lemon is not a sub-
jective mode of apprehending the lemon; it is the lemon,
■^d it is not true either that the object X appears as the
empty form which holds together disparate qualities. In fact
the lemon is extended throughout its qualities, and each of
its qualities is extended throughout each of the others. It is
the sourness of the lemon which is yellow, it is the yellow
of the lemon which is sour. We eat the color of a cake, and
the taste of this cake is the instrument which reveals its
shape and its color to what we may call the alimentary in-
tuition. Conversely if I poke my finger into a jar of jam,
the sticky coldness of that jam is the revelation to my fin-
gers of its sugary taste. The fluidity, the tepidity, the bluish
^ior, the undulating restlessness of the water in a pool are
given at one stroke, each quality through the others; and
It IS this total interpenetration which we call the this. This
258
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
fact has been clearly shown by the experiences of painters,
especially of Cezanne, Husserl is wrong in believing that a
synthetic necessity unconditionally unites color and form;
it is the form which is color and light. If the painter wants
to vary any one of these factors, the others change as well,
not because they are linked by some sort of law but because
at bottom they are one and the same being.
In this sense every quality of being is all of being; the
quality is the presence of the absolute contingency of being,
its indifferent irreducibility. The apprehension of a quality
does not add anything to being except the fact that being is
there as this. In this sense a quality is not an external aspect
of being, for being, since it has no “within,” can not have
a “without.” But in order for there to be quality there must
be being for a nothingness which by nature is ^ not being.
Yet being is not in itself a quality although it is nothing
either more or less. But quality is the whole of being re-
vealing itself within the limits of the “there is.” It is not
the outside’’ of being; it is all being since there cannot be
being for being but only for that which makes itself not to
be bemg. The relation of the For-itself to quality is an on-
tological relation. The intuition of a quality is not the pas-
sive contemplation of a given, and the mind is not an In-
itself which remains what it is in that contemplation; that
IS, which remains in the mode of indifference in relation to
•f For-itself makes known to
Itself what it is by means of quality. For the For-itself, to
color of this notebook is to reflect on
itself as the internal negation of that quality. That is, the
apprehension of quality is not a “fulfillment” (Erfullung)
as Husserl makes it, but the giving form, to an emptiness as
a e ermmed emptiness of that quality. In this sense qual-
ity^a presence perpetually out of reach.
e description of knowledge is too often alimentary.
®re s remains too much of prelogisme^ in episte-
philosophy, and we are not yet rid of that primitive
(which we must account for later) according to
o know is to eat — ^that is, to ingest the known ob-
the ^ ^ borrowed from a now discredited theory to
not loEicat tn stage of human development, ' thought was
-voiding contradic-
de la vhllo'tnn-h- Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique
philasoph.e. Pans: universitaires de France. 1951. pp. 814-815.
TRANSCENDENCE
259
ject, to fill oneself with it {ErfUllung), and to digest it
(“assimilation”) . We shall best account for the original phe-
nomenon of perception by insisting on the fact that the re-
lation of the quality to us is that of absolute proximity (it
“is there,’* it haunts us) without either giving or refusing
itself, but we must add that this proximity implies a dis-
tance. If is what is immediately out of reach, what by defi-
nition refers us to ourselves as to an emptiness. Contempla-
tion of it can only increase our thirst for being as the sight
of the food out of reach added to Tantalus’ hunger. Quality
is the indication of what we are not and of the mode of
being which is denied to us. The perception of white is the
consciousness of the impossibility on principle for the For-
itself to exist as color — that is, by being what it is. In this
sense not only is being not distinguished from its qualities
but even the whole apprehension of quality is the appre-
hension of a this. Quality, whatever it may be, is revealed
to us as a being. The odor which I suddenly breathe in with
my eyes closed, even before I have referred it to an odorous
object, is already an odor-being and not a subjective impres-
sion. The light which strikes my eyes in the morning through
my closed eyelids is already a light-being. This will appear
obvious if one reflects on the fact that quality is. As a being
which is what it is, it can indeed appear to a subjectivity,
but it can not be inserted in the woof of that subjectivity
which is what it is not and which is not what it is. To say
that a quality is a quality-being is not to endow it with a
mysterious support analogous to substance; it is simply to
observe that its mode of being is radically different from
the mode of the being “for-itself.” The being of whiteness
or of sourness indeed could in no way be apprehended as
ekstatic.
If someone should ask now how it happens that the “this”
bas qualities we should reply that actually the this is released
as a totality on the ground of the world and that it is given
as an undifferentiated unity. It is the for-itself which can
deny itself from various points of view when confronting
tbe this and which reveals the quality as a new this on the
ground of the thing. For each negating act by which the
freedom of the For-itself spontaneously constitutes its being,
there is a corresponding total revelation of being “in pro-
me.” This profile is nothing but a relation of the thing to
the For-itself, a relation realized by the For-itself. It is the
260 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
absolute determination of negativity, for it is not enou^
that the for-itself by an original negation should not be
being nor that it should not be this being; in order for its
determination as the nothingness of being to be full, the
for-itself must realize itself as a certain unique manner of
not being this being.
This absolute determination, which is the determination
of quality as a profile of the “this,” belongs to the freedom
of the For-itself. It is not; it is as “to-be.” Anyone may
see this for himself by considering how the revelation of
one quality of the thing appears always as a factual gratuity
grasped across a freedom. While I can not make this orange
peel cease being green, it is I who am responsible for my
apprehending it as a rough green or a green roughness. But
the relation figure-ground here is rather different from that
of the this to the world. For instead of the figure’s appear-
ing on an undifferentiated ground, it is wholly penetrated
by the ground; it holds the ground within it as its own un-
differentiated density. I apprehend the peel as green; its
“brightness-roughness” is revealed as an inner undifferenti-
ated ground and plenitude of being for the green. There is
no abstraction here in the sense that abstraction separates
what is united, for being always appears entire in it§ profile.
But the realization of being conditions the abstraction, for
the abstraction is not the apprehension of a quality “in mid-
air” but of a this-quality where the undifferentiation of the
inner ground tends toward absolute equilibrium. The green
abstracted does not lose its density of being — otherwise it
would be nothing more than a subjective mode of the for-
itself — but the brightness, the shape, the roughness, etc.,
which are given across it dissolve in the nihilating equilibri-
um of pure and simple massiveness. Abstraction, however,
is a phenomenon of presence to being since abstract being
preserves its transcendence. But it can be realized only as a
presence to being beyond being; it is a surpassing. This
presence to being can be realized only on the level of pos-
sibility and in so far as the For-itself has to be its own pos-
sibilities. The abstract is revealed as the meaning which
quality has to be as co-present to the presence of a for-itself
to-come. Thus the abstract green is the meaning-to-come of
the concrete this in so far as it reveals itself to me through
its profile “green-brightness-roughness.” The green is the pe-
culiar possibility of this profile in so far as it is revealed
TRANSCENDENCE
261
across the possibilities which I am; that is, in so far as it is
made-to-be. But this brings us to instnimentality and the
temporality of the world. We shall - return to this point. For
the moment it is sufficient to say that the abstract haunts the
concrete as a possibility fixed in the in-itself, which the con-
crete has to be. Whatever our perception may be, as the orig-
inal contact with being, the abstract is always there but to-
come; I apprehend it in the future with my future. It is
correlative with the peculiar possibility of my present con-
crete negation as the possibility of being no more than this
negation. The abstract is the meaning of this in so far as it
reveals itself in the future across my possibility of fixing in
in-itself the negation which I have to be.
If someone should remind us here of the classic difficulties
regarding abstraction, we should reply that they stem from
the fact that the constitution of the “this” and the act of ab-
straction are taken as distinct. It is certain that if the this
does not include its own abstractions, there is no possibility
of deriving them from it afterward. But it is in the very con-
stitution of the this as this that the abstraction operates as
the revelation in profile of my future. The For-itself is an
“abstractor,” not because it could realize a psychological
operation of abstraction but because it rises as a presence to
being with a future — ^that is, a beyond being. In itself being
is neither concrete nor abstract nor present nor future; it is
what it is. Yet the abstraction does not enrich being; it is
only the revelation of a nothingness of being beyond being.
But we challenge anyone to formulate the classic objections
to abstraction without deriving them implicitly from the con-
sideration of being as a this.
The original relation of the thises to one another can be
neither interaction nor causality nor even the upsurge on
the same ground of the world. If we suppose that the For-
itself is present to one this, the other thises exist at the
same time “in the world” but by virtue of being undiffer-
entiated: they constitute the ground on which the this con-
fronted is raised in relief. In order to establish any relation
whatsoever between one this and another this, it is neces-
sary that the second this be revealed rising up on the ground
of the world on the occasion of an express negation which
the For-itself has to be. But at the same time each this
must be held at a distance from the other as not being the
other by a negation of a purely external type. Thus the
262 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
original relation of this to that is an external negation. That
appears as not being this. And the external negation is re-
vealed to the For-itself as a transcendent; it is outside, it
is in-itself. How are we to understand it?
The appearance of the this-that can he produced first
only as totality. The primary relation here is the unity of a
totality capable of disintegration; the For-itself is deter-
mined en bloc to not-be “this-that” on the ground of the
world. The “this-that” is my whole room in so far as I am
present to it. This concrete negation will not then dis-
appear with the disintegration of the concrete mass into
this and that. On the contrary it is the very condition of
the disintegration. But on this ground of presence and by
means of this ground of presence, being effects the appear-
ance of its indifferent exteriority. This exteriority is revealed
to me in the fact that the negation which I am is a unity-
multiplicity rather than an undifferentiated totality. My neg-
ative upsurge into being is parceled out into independent
negations which have no connection other than that they are
negations which I have to be; that is, they derive their inner
unity from me and not from being. I am present to that
table, to those chairs, and as such I constitute myself syn-
thetically as a polyvalent negation; but this purely inner ne-
gation, in so far as it is a negation of being, is paralyzed
with zones of nothingness; it is nihilated by virtue of ne-
gation, it is negation detotalized. Across these striations of
nothingness which - 1 have to be as my own nothingness of
negation, appears the indifference of being. But this indiffer-
ence I have to realize by this nothingness of negation
which I have to be, not in so far as I am originally present
to the “this” but in so far as I am also present to the “that.”
It is in and by my presence to the table that I realize the
indifference of the chair (which presently I also have to not-
be) as an absence of a springboard, an arrest of my impulse
toward non-being, a breakdown in the circuit. “That” ap-
pears alongside “this,” in the heart of a total revelation, as
that from which I can in no way profit so as to determine
myself to not-be “this.”
Thus^ cleavage comes from being, but there is cleavage and
separation only through the presence of the For-itself to all
of being. The negation of the unity of the negations, in so
ar as it is a revelation of the indifference of being and in
so far as it apprehends the indifference of the “this” with
TRANSCENDENCE
263
regard to the “that” and the “that” with regard to the “this,”
is a revelation of the original relation of the thises in an ex-
ternal negation. The “this” is not “that.” This external ne-
gation within the unity of. a totality capable of disintegration
is expressed by the word “and.” “This is not that” is written
“this and that.” The external negation has the double char-
acter of being-inTtself and of being pure ideality. It is in-
itself in that it does not in any way belong to the For-itself;
the For-itself discovers the indifference of being as exterior-
ity across the- absolute interiority of its own negation (since
in aesthetic intuition I apprehend an imaginary object).
Moreover we are not dealing with a negation which being
has to be; this negation does not belong to any of the thises
considered; it purely and simply is. It is what it is. But at
the same time it is by no means a characteristic of the this,
by no means one of its qualities. It is even totally independ-
ent of the thises, precisely because it does not belong to any
one of them. For the indifference of being is nothing;
we can not think it or even perceive it. It means simply
that annihilation or the variations of the that can engage
the this in nothing; in this sense it is only a nothingness in-
-itself separating the thises, and this nothingness is the only
piode in which consciousness can realize the cohesion of
identity which characterizes being.
This ideal nothingness in-itself is quantity. Quantity in
fact is pure exteriority; it does not depend on the terms add-
ed but is only the affirmation of their independence. To
count is to make an ideal distinction inside a totality capable
of disintegration and already given. The number obtained by
the addition does not belong to any of the thises counted nor
to the totality capable of disintegration — ^in so far as this is
revealed as totality. If there are three men talking opposite
oie, it is not as I apprehend them first as a “group in conver-
sation” that I count them; and the fact of counting them as
three leaves the concrete unity of their group perfectly intact.
Being a “group of three” is not a concrete property of the
group. Neither is it a property of its members. We can not
say of any of/ them that he is three nor even that he is a
third — ^for the quality of third is only a reflection of the free-
dom of the for-itself which is counting; each one of the men
can be a third, but no one of them is it. The relation of quan-
tity is therefore a relation in-itself but a purely negative and
external relation. It is precisely because it does not belong
264
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
either to things or to totalities that it is isolated and de-
tached from the surface of the world as a reflection (reflet)
of nothingness cast on being. As a purely exterior relation
between the thises, quantity is itself exterior to them and
finally exterior to itself. It is the inapprehensible indiffer-
ence of being — ^which can appear only if there is being
and which, although belonging to being, can come to it
only from a for-itself, inasmuch as this indifference can be
revealed only by the exteriorization to infinity of a relation
of exteriority which must be exterior to being and to it-
self. Thus space and quantity are only one and the same
type of negation. By the sole fact that this and that are re-
vealed as having no relation to me who am my own relation,
space and quantity come into the world; for each one of
them is the relation of things which are unrelated or, if you
prefer, the nothingness of relation apprehended as a rela-
tion by the being which is its own relation. From this we
can see that what Husserl calls categories (unity-multiplic-
ity-relation of the whole to the part — more and less —
around — beside — following — ^first, second, etc. — one, two,
three, etc . — ^within and without — etc .) — these are only
the ideal mixing of things which leaves them wholly intact,
without either enriching or impoverishing them by one
jota; they merely indicate the infinite diversity of ways in
which the freedom of the for-itself can realize the indiffer-
ence of being.
We have treated the problem of the original relation of
the for-itself to being as if the for-itself were a simple, in-
stantaneous consciousness such as can be revealed to the
Cartesian cogito. In truth we have already encountered the
escape from self on the part of the for-itself inasmuch as
this is the necessary condition for the appearance of the
thises and of abstractions. But the ekstatic character of the
for-itself was still only implicit. While we have had to pro-
ceed in this way for the sake of clarity in exposition, we
should not thereby conclude that being is revealed to a being
which would be first presence in order afterwards to con-
stitute itself a future. But being-in-itself is -revealed to a
being which arises as about-to-come to itself. This means
that the negation which the for-itself makes itself be in the
presence of being has an ekstatic dimension of the future;
It IS m so far as I am not what I am (an ekstatic relation
to my own possibilities) that I have to not-be .being-in-itself
TRANSCENDENCE
265
as the revealing realization of the this. That means that I am
presence to the “this” in the incompleteness of a totality
detotalized. What consequence is there here for the revelation
of the this?
Since I am always beyond what I am, about-to-come to
myself, the “this” to which I am present appears to me as
something which I surpass toward myself. The perceived is
originally the surpassed; it is like a conductor in the circuit
of selfness, and it appears within the limits of this circuit.
To the extent that I make myself be the negation of the
this, I flee this negation in the direction of a complemen-
tary negation; and the fusion of the two would effect the
appearance of the in-itself which I am. There is a bond of
being between the negation of the this and the second pos-
sible negation; the second is not just any negation but is pre-
cisely the complementary negation of my presence to the
thing. But since the for-itself constitutes itself qua presence,
as .a non-positional self-consciousness, it makes known to
itself, outside itself, through being, what it is not. It re-
covers its being outside in the mode “reflection-reflect-
ing.” The complementary negation which the for-itself is
as its own possibility is then a negation-presence; that is,
the for-itself has to be it as a non-thetic self-consciousness
and as a thetic consciousness of being-beyond-being.
Being-beyond-being is bound to the present this, not by
any kind of external relation but by a precise bond of
complementarity which stands in exact correlation with the
relation of the for-itself to its future. First of all, the this
is revealed in the negation of a being which medces itself
to not-be this, not by virtue of simple presence, but as a
negation which is about-to-come to itself, which is its own
possibility beyond its present. This possibility which haunts
pure presence as its meaning out of reach and as that which
it lacks in order to be in-itself exists first as a projection of
the present negation by virtue of engagement. Every nega-
tion in fact which would not have beyond itself in the fu-
ture the meaning of an engagement as a possibility which
comes to it and toward which it flees itself, would lose all
its significance as negation. What the for-itself denies, it
denies “with the dimension of a future.” It involves either
an external negation (this is not that, that chair is not a
table) or an internal negation bearing on itself. To say that
“this is not that” is to posit the exteriority of the “this” in
266
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
relation to the “that,” whether for now and for the future
or in the strict “now”; but in the latter case the negation
has a provisory character which constitutes the future as pure
exteriority in relation to the present determination “this and
that.” In both cases the meaning comes to the negation in
terms of the future; all negation is ekstatic. In so far as the
for-itself denies itself in the future, the this concerning
which it makes itself a negation is revealed as coming to it-
self from the future. The possibility that consciousness exists
non-thetically as consciousness (of) being able not to not-
be this is revealed as the potentiality of the this of being
what it is. The first potentiality of the object, as the corre-
late of the engagement, an ontological structure of the ne-
gation, is permanence, which perpetually comes to it on the
ground of the future. The revelation of the table as table
requires a permanence of table which comes to it from the
future and which is not a purely established given, but a
potentiality. This permanence moreover does not come to
the table from a future located in temporal infinity. Infinite
time does not yet exist. The table is not revealed as having
the possibility of being a table indefinitely. The time con-
cerned here is neither finite nor infinite; potentiality merely
causes the dimension of the future to appear.
When we speak of the meaning-to-corae of the negation,
we refer to that which the negation of the for-itself lacks
in order to become a negation in itself. In this sense the
negation is, in the future, the precision® of the present nega-
tion. It is in the future that there is revealed the exact mean-
ing^ of what I have to not-be as a correlate of the exact ne-
gation which I have to be. The polymorphic negation of the
this, where the green is formed by a totality “roughness-
light,” gets its meaning only if it has to be the negation of
the green; that is, of a being-green, the ground of which
tends toward the equilibrium of undifferentiation. In a word,
the absent-meaning of my polymorphic negation is a nega-
lon confined by a green more purely green on an undiffer-
entiated ground. Thus the pure green comes to the “green-
roughness-light” on the ground of the future as its meaning.
e apprehend here^ the meaning of what we have called
a straction. The ewstent does not possess its essence as a
present quality It is even the negation of essence: the green
^ technical sense of ‘‘determination’' or “giving an exact
TRANSCENDENCE
267
, never is green. But the essence comes from the ground of
the future to the existent, as a meaning which is never given
and which forever haunts it. It is the pure correlate of the
pure ideality of my negation. In this sense there is no such
thing as an operation of abstraction if we mean by that a
psychological afiirmative act of selection effected by a con-
stituted mind. Far from abstracting certain qualities in terms
of things, we must on the contrary view abstraction as the
original mode of being of the for-itself, necessary in order
that there may be, in general, things and a world. The ab-
stract is a structure of the world and is necessary for the up-
surge of the concrete; the concrete is concrete only in so far
as it leans in the direction of its abstraction, that it makes it-
self known by the abstraction which it is. The being of the
for-itself is revealing-abstracting. We see that from this point
of view permanence and the abstract are only one. If the
table has qua table a potentiality of permanence, this is to the
exact degree that it has to be a table. Permanence is pure pos-
sibility for a this to be consistent with its essence.
We have seen in Part Two of this work that the relation
between the possible which I am and the present which I
am fleeing is the same as the relation between the lacking
and the one which lacks what is lacking. The ideal fusion
of the lacking with the one which lacks what is lacking is
an unrealizable totality which haunts the for-itself and con-
stitutes its very being as a nothingness of being. This
ideal we called the in-itself-for-itself or value. But on the
unreflective level this value is not grasped thetically by the
for-itself; it is only a condition of being. If our conclusions
are accurate, this perpetual indication of an unrealizable fu-
sion must appear not as a structure of the unreflective con-
sciousness but as a transcendent indication of an ideal struc-
ture of the object. This structure can be easily revealed;
correlative with the indication of a fusion of the polymor-
phic negation with the abstract negation which is its mean-
ing, there is to be revealed a transcendent and ideal indi-
cation — that of a fusion of the existing this with its essence
to-come. Thus fusion must be such that the abstract is the
foundation of the concrete and that simultaneously the con-
crete is the foundation of the abstract. In other words, the
concrete “flesh and blood” existence must be the essence, and
the essence must itself be produced as a total concretion;
that is, it must have the full richness of the concrete with-
268
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
out however allowing us to discover in it anything other
than itself in its total purity. Or if you prefer, the form
must be to itself — and totally — ^its own matter. And converse-
ly the matter must be produced as absolute form.
This perpetually indicated but impossible fusion of es-
sence and existence does not belong either to the present or
the future; it indicates rather the fusion of past, present,
and future, and it presents itself as a synthesis to be effected
of temporal totality. It is value as transcendence; it is what
we call beauty. Beauty therefore represents an ideal state of
the world, correlative with an ideal realization of the for-
itself; in this realization the essence and the existence of
things are revealed as identity to a being who, in this very
revelation, would be merged with himself in the absolute
unity of the in-itself. This is precisely because the beautiful
is not only a transcendent synthesis to be effected but be-
cause it can be realized only in and through a totalization of
ourselves. This is precisely why we desire the beautiful and
why we apprehend the universe as lacking the beautiful to
the extent that we ourselves apprehend ourselves as a lack.
But the beautiful is no more a potentiality of things than the
m-itself-for-itself is a peculiar possibility of the for-itself.
It haunts^ the world as an unrealizable. To the extent that
man realizes the beautiful in the world, he realizes it in the
^aginary mode. This means that in the aesthetic intuition,
I apprehend an imaginary object across an imaginary realiza-
nayself as a totality in-itself and for-itself. Ordinarily
the beautiful, like value, is not thematically made explicit as
a value-out-of-reach-of-the-world. It is implicitly apprehend-
ed on things as an absence; it is revealed implicitly across the
imperfection of the world.
These original potentialities are not the only ones which
characterize the this. To the extent that the for-itself has
to be Its bemg beyond its present, it is the revelation of a
qualified beyond-bemg, which comes to the “this” on the
^oun of being. In so far as the for-itself is beyond the
moon, next to a being-beyond-being which is the
, ^ moon the full moon becomes the potentiality of
hurl ^ for-itself is beyond the
hnw’ TT, ° the flower, the flower is a potentiality of the
oritHnai ^ ^tion of these new potentialities implies an
nection htu ^ ^^^t the con-
een the crescent moon and the full moon, be-
TRANSCENDENCE
269
tweea the bud and the flower is gradually discovered. The
past of the for-itself stands as empirical knowledge for the
for-itself. But this knowledge does not remain as an inert
given. It is behind the for-itself, of course, unrecognizable
as such and out of reach. But in the ekstatic unity of its be-
ing, it is in terms of this past that the for-itself makes known
to itself what it is in the future. My wisdom (savoir) as re-
gards the moon escapes me as a thematic knowledge (con-
naissance) . But I am it,- and my way of being is — at least m
certain cases — to cause what I no longer am to come to me
in the form of what I am not yet. This negation of the this
— ^which I have been — I am in two ways: in the mode of not
being any longer and of not being yet. I am beyond the cres-
cent moon as the possibility of a radical negation of the
moon as a full disc; and correlative with the return of my
future negation toward my presence, the full moon comes
back toward the crescent in order to determine it in this as a
negation; the full moon is what the crescent lacks; it is the
lack of the full moon which makes the crescent a crescent
Thus within the unity of the same ontological negation, I
attribute the dimension of the future to the crescent as cres-
cent — ^in the form of permanence and essence — and I con-
stitute it as the crescent moon by the determining return
toward it of what it lacks. Thus is constituted the scale of
possibilities which reaches from permanence to potencies. Hu-
man-reality, by surpassing itself in the direction of its own
possibility of negation, makes itself that by which negation
through surpassing comes into the world. It is through hu-
man reality that lack comes to things in the form of “po-
tency,” of “incompletion,” of “suspension,” of “potentiali-
ty.”
Nevertheless the transcendent being of lack can not have
the nature of ekstatic lack in immanence. Let us look at it
more carefully. The in-itself does not have to be its own
potentiality in the mode of not-yet The revelation of the
in-itself is originally a revelation of the self-identity of indif-
ference. The in-itself is what it is without any ekstatic dis-
persion of its being. It does not have to be its permanence
or its essence or that which it lacks as I have to be my fu-
ture. My upsurge into the world causes potentialities to arise
correlatively. But these potentialities are fixed in their very
arising; they are eaten away by exteriority. We shall discover
here again that double aspect of the transcendent which in
270
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
its very ambiguity has given birth to space: a totality which
is dispersed in relations of exteriority. Potentiality on the
ground of the future turns back on the this to determine it,
but the relation between the this as in-itself and its potenti-
ality is an external relation. The crescent moon is determined
as lacking or deprived of — ^in relation to the full moon.
But at the same time the crescent is revealed as being fully
what it is — ^that concrete sign in the sky, which needs noth-
ing in order to be what it is. The same is true for this bud
or for this match, which is What it is, for which its meaning
as being-a-match remains exterior, which can of course burst
into flame but which at present is this piece of white wood
with a black tip. The potentialities of the this, while strict-
ly connected with it, are present as in-itselfs and are in a
state of indifference in relation to it. This inkwell can be
broken, thrown against the marble of the fireplace where it
wfil be shattered. But this potentiality is entirely cut off
for it is only the transcendent correlate of my pos-
sibility of throwing the inkwell against the marble of the
fireplace. In itself the inkwell is neither breakable nor un-
breakable; it is.
That does not mean that I can consider a this as outside
all potentiality; from the mere fact that I am my own future,
the this is revealed as provided with potentialities. To ap-
prehend the match as a piece of white wood with a black tip
IS not to strip it of all potentiality but simply to confer on it
new ones (a new permanence — a new essence). In order for
the this to be entirely deprived of potentialities, it would be
necessary that I be a pure present, which is inconceivable.
But the^ this has various potentialities which are equivalents
^that is, in a state of equivalence in relation to it. This is
. ^use it does not have to he them. In addition my possi-
ties do not exist but are possibilized because they are eat-
en away from within by my freedom; that is, whatever my
opposite is equally possible. I can shatter
tos u^ell but I can just as well put it in a drawer. I can
. ^ foil moon beyond the crescent moon, but I can
3 s as well msist on the permanence of the crescent as such.
^ found to be provided with
to be put in a drawer, to be shat-
or n V, moon can be an open curve in the sky
bacV fa ®ospense. Those potentialities which refer
IS Without being made to be by it and without
TRANSCENDENCE
271
having to be — ^those we shall call probabilities to indicate
that they exist in the mode of being of the in-itself. We can
not say that my possibles are; they are possibilized. But
probabilities are not “probabilized,” they are each one in it-
self as probable. In this sense the inkweU is, but its being-
an-inkwell is a probable; for the inkwell’s having-to-be-an-
inkwell is a pure appearance which is founded immediately
on a relation of exteriority.
These potentialities or probabilities, which are the mean-
ing of being beyond being, are in-itselfs beyond being, and
precisely for this reason they are nothings. The essence of
the inkwell is made-to-be as a correlate of the possible ne-
gation of the for-itself, but it is not the inkwell and it is not
being. In so far as this essence is in-itself, it 'is a negation
hypostasized and reified; that is, it is a nothing, it belongs
to the shell of nothingness which encases and determines
the world. The for-itself reveals the inkwell as an inkwell.
But this revelation is made beyond the being of the inkwell,
in that future which is not; all the potentialities of being,
from permanence to qualified potentialities, are defined as
that which being is not yet without ever truly having to be
them. Here again knowledge adds nothing to being and
removes nothing from it; knowledge adorns it with no new
quality. It causes being to-be-there by surpassing it toward
a nothingness which enters into only negative exterior rela-
tions with it. This character of pure nothingness in poten-
tiality results in efforts on the part of science, which aims at
establishing relations of simple exteriority, radically to sup-
press the potential (essence and potencies). But on the oth-
er hand the necessity of potentiality as a meaningful struc-
ture of perception appears clearly enough so that we need
not insist on it here. Scientific knowledge, in fact, can nei-
ther overcome nor suppress the potentializing structure of
perception. On the contrary science must presuppose it.
We have attempted to show how the presence of the for-
itself to being reveals being as a thing, and for the sake of
clarity in exposition we have had to show successively the
various structures of the thing; the this and spatiality, per-
manence, essence and potentialities. It is evident, however,
that this successive account does not correspond to a real
priority of certain of these moments over others: the upsurge
of the for-itself causes the thing to be revealed with the
totality of its structures. Furthermore there is not one of
272
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
these structures which does not imply all the others. The
this does not have even logical priority over essence. On the
contrary the this presupposes essence, and conversely essence
is the essence of this. Similarly the this as the being-of-a-
quality can appear only on the ground of the world, but the
world is a collection of thises; the disintegrating relation of
the world to the thises, of the thises to the world is spatial-
ity. There is therefore no substantial form here, no prin-
ciple of unity to stand behind the modes of appearance of
the phenomenon; everything is given at one stroke without
any primacy. For the same reasons, it would be incorrect to
conceive of any kind of primacy as concerns the representa-
tive. Our descriptions have led us to put in relief the thing
in the^ world, and because of this fact we might be tempted
to believe that the world and the thing are revealed to the
for-itself in a sort of contemplative intuition. This, how-
ever, would be an intuition after the event such that objects
would be arranged one in relation to another in a practical
order of instrumentality. Such an error will be avoided if
we are willing to maintain that the world appears inside the
cu*cuit of selfness. It is this which separates the for-itself
from itself or— to employ an expression of Heidegger’s— it
® ^ terms of which human reality makes known to it-
self what It IS.
'Hus project toward self on the part of the for-itself,
which constitutes selfness, is in no way a contemplative re-
pose. It is a lack, as we have said, but not a given lack. It
IS a lack which has to be to itself its own lack. It must be
understood that an established lack or a lack in-itself van-
ishes mto exterionty, as we have pointed out in preceding
passages. But a being which constitutes itself as lack can de-
termme itself only there upon that which it lacks and which
f perpetual wrenching away from self to-
hp f which it has to be. This means that lack can
as a refused lack: the only
tw .connection between that which lacks and
IS lacking IS the refusal. In fact to the extent that
® it we ep-
awal^-ntf ^ if negation is not to slip
of exterionty — and along with it all possibility
foundation must be to the ne-
S r® ‘ticks ,o be that which it
lacks. Thus the foundation of the negation is negation of
TRANSCENDENCE
273
negatiqn. But this negation-foundation is no more a given
than the lack of which it is an essential moment; it is as hav-
ing to be. The for-itself in the phantom unity “reflection-
reflecting” makes itself be its own lack; that is, it pro-
jects itself toward its lack by refusing it. It is only as a lack
to be suppressed that lack can be internal for the for-itself,
and the for-itself can realize its own lack only by having to
be it; that is, by being a project toward its suppression.
Thus the relation of the for-itself to its future is never static
nor given; the future comes to the present of the for-itself
in order to determine it in its heart inasmuch as the for-
itself is already there at the future as its suppression. The
for-itself can be a lack here only if it is there a suppression
of the lack, but a suppression which it has to be in the mode
of non-being. It is this original relation which subsequently
allows the empirical establishment of particular lacks as
lacks suffered or endured. It is in general the foundation
of affectivity; it is this also which some will try to explain
psychologically by installing mthin the psyche those idols
and those phantoms which we call drives or appetites. These
drives or these forces, which by violence are inserted into
the psyche, are not understandable in themselves, for they
are given by the psychologist as in-itself existents; that is,
their very character as force is contradicted by their inner
repose of indifference, and their unity is dispersed in a pure
relation of exteriority. We can apprehend them only as the
result of projecting into the in-itself a relation of immanent
being of the for-itself to itself and this ontological relation
is precisely lack.
But this lack can not be grasped thetically and known by
the unreflective consciousness (nor does it appear to the im-
pure, accessory reflection which apprehends it as a psychic
object — i.e., as a drive or as a feeling). It is accessible only
to the purifying reflection, with which we are not here con-
cerned. On the level of consciousness of the world, this
lack can appear only in projection, as a transcendent and
ideal characteristic. In fact while that which the for-itself
lacks is the ideal presence to a being-beyond-being, the be-
ing-beyond-being is originally apprehended as the lacking-
to-being. Thus the world is revealed as haunted by absences
to be realized, and each this appears with a cortege of ab-
sences which point to it and determine it These absences
274
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
are not basically different from potentialities. But it is easier
to grasp their meaning. Thus the absences indicate the this
as this, and conversely the this points toward the absences.
Since each absence is being-beyond-being — i.e., an absent-
in-itself — each this points toward another state of its being
or toward other beings. But of course this organization of
indicative complexes is fixed and petrified in in-itself; hence
all these mute and petrified indications, which fall back into
the indifference of isolation at the same time that they arise,
resemble the fixed, stony smile in the empty eyes of a statue.
The absences which appear behind things do not appear
as absences to be made present by things. Neither can we
say that they are revealed as to be realized by me since the
“me” is a transcendent structure of the psyche and appears
only to the reflective consciousness. They are pure demands
which rise as “voids to be filled” in the middle of the cir-
cuit of selfness. Their character as “voids to be filled by the
' for-itself” is manifested to the unreflective consciousness by
a direct and personal urgency which is lived as such without
being referred to somebody or thematized. It is in and
through the very fact of living them as claims that there is
revealed what in an earlier chapter we called their selfness.
They are tasks, and this world is a world of tasks. In rela-
tion to the tasks, the this which they indicate is both “the
this of these tasks” — ^that is, the unique in-itself which is
determined by them and which they indicate as being able
to fulfill them — and that which does not have to be these
tasks since it exists in the absolute unity of identity. This
comection in isolation, this inert relation within the dynam-
ic is what we call the relation of means to end. It is a being-
for which is degraded, laminated by exteriority, a being-for
whose transcendent ideality can be conceived only as a cor-
rel^ of the being-for which the for-itself has to be.
. ® in so far as it both rests in the quiet beatitude
of mdifference and yet points beyond it to tasks to be per-
fOTmed which make known to it what it has to be, is an in-
L utensil. The original relation between things,
a which appears on the foundation of the quantitative re-
a on o the thises, is the relation of instrumentality. This
mstn^entahty is not subsequent to or subordinate to the
s rue res already ^ indicated: in one sense it presupposes
^ presupposed by them. The thing is
s a thing m order to be subsequently an instrument;
TRANSCENDENCE
275
neither is it first an instrument in order .to be revealed sub-
sequently as a thing. It is an instrumental-thing. It is true,
nevertheless, that the further research of the scientist will
reveal it as purely a thing — i.e., stripped of all instru-
mentality. But this is because the scientist is concerned only
with establishing purely exterior relations. Moreover the re-
sult of this scientific research is that the thing itself, deprived
of all instrumentality, finally disappears into absolute ex-
teriority. We can see to what extent we must correct Heideg-
ger’s definition: to be sure, the world appears in the circuit
of selfness; but since the circuit is non-thetic, the maldng
known of what I am can not be thetic either. To be in the
world is not to escape from the world toward oneself but to
escape from the world toward a beyond-the-world which is
the future world. What the world makes known to me is
only “worldly.” It follows that if the infinite reference of
instruments never refers to a for-itself which I am, then
the totality of instruments is the exact correlate of my pos-
sibilities; and as I am my possibilities, the order of instru-
ments in the world is the image of my possibilities projected
in the in-itself; i.e., the image of what I am. But I can nev-
er decipher this worldly image; I adapt myself to it in and
through action, but a reflective scissiparity would be required
m order for me to be able to be an object to myself.
It is not then through unauthenticity that human reality
loses itself in the world. For human reality, being-in-the-
world means radically to lose oneself in the world through
the very revelation which causes there to be a world — ^that is,
to be referred without respite, without even the possibility
of “a purpose for which” from instrument to instrument
with no recourse save the reflective revolution. It would be
useless to object that the chain of “for whats” is suspended
from the “for whoms” (Worumwillen) . Of course the
Worumwillen refers us to a structure of being which we have
not yet elucidated; namely, the for-others. And the “for
whom” constantly appears behind the instruments. But this
“for whom,” whose constitution is different from the “for
what,” does not break the chain. It is simply one of the
links; when it is confronted in the perspective of instru-
mentality, it does not allow an escape from the in-itself. To
be sure Aese workclothes are for the worker. But they are
for the worker so that he can fix the roof without getting
dirty. And why shouldn’t he get dirty? In order not to spend
276 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
most of his salary for clothes. This salary is, allotted him as
the minimnm quantity of money which will enable him to
support himself; and he “supports” himself so as to be able
to apply his capacities for work at repairing roofs. And why
should he repair the roof? So that it will not rain in the of-
fice where employees are working at book-keeping. Etc.
This does not mean that we should always think of the Oth-
er as an instrument of a particular type, but merely that
when we consider the Other in terms of the world, we do
not escape even so from the infinite regress of instrumental
complexes.
Thus to the extent that the for-itself is its own lack as a
refusal correlative with its impulse toward self, being is re-
vealed to the for-itself on the ground of the world as an in-
strumental-thing, and the world rises as the undifferentiated
ground of indicative complexes of instrumentality. The en-
semble of these references is void of meaning but in this
sense — ^that the possibility of positing the problem of mean-
ing on this level does not exist. We work to live and we
live to work. The question of the meaning of the totality
“life-work” — “Why do I work, I who am living? Why live
if it is in order to work?” — ^this can be posited only on the
reflective level since it implies a self-discovery on the part
of the for-itself.
It remains to explain how as a correlate of the pure nega-
tion which I am, instrumentality can arise in the world. How
does it happen that I am not a barren, indefinitely repeated
negation of the this as pure this? If I am nothing but the .
pure nothingness which I have to be, how can this n^a- ^
tion reveal a plurality of tasks which are my image? In order
to answer this question we must recall that the, for-itself is ,
not purely and simply a future which comes to the present.
It has to be also its past in the form of “was?* The ekstatic
contradiction in the three temporal dimensions is such that
while the for-itself is a being which by means of its futoe
makes known to itself the meaning of what it was, it is
also in the same upsurge a being which has to be its will-be
within the perspectives of a certain “was” which it is fleeing.
In this sense we must always look for the meaning of a
temporal dimension elsewhere, in another dimension. This
.K. what we have called the diaspora, for the unity of di-
asporatic being is not a pure given appurtenance; it is the
TRANSCENDENCE 277
necessity of realizing the diaspora by making itself condi-
tioned there outside within the unity of the self.
Therefore the negation which I am and which reveals the
“this” has to be in the mode of “was.” This pure negation
which as simple presence is not, has its being behind it, as
past or facticity. As such we must recognize that it is never a
negation without roots. On the contrary, it is a qualified ne-
gation — ^if by that we understand that it drags its qualifica-
tion behind it as the being which it has to not-be in the
form of “was.” The negation arises as a non-thetic negation
of the past in the mode of internal determination in so far
as it makes itself a thetic negation of the this. The upsurge
is effected in the unity of a double “being for,” since the
negation effects its existence in the mode of reflection-
reflecting, as the negation of the this, in order to escape
from the past which it is; it escapes from the past in order
to disengage itself from the this by fleeing it in its being
toward the future. This is what we shall call the point of
view which the for-itself has on the world. This point of
view, comparable to facticity, is the ekstatic qualification of
the negation as the original relation to the in-itself. On the
other hand, as we have seen, everything that is for-itself is
so in the mode of “was”' as an ekstatic appurtenance of the
world. It is not in the future that I rediscover my presence
since the future releases the world to me as correlative with
a consciousness to-cpme. Rather my being appears to me in
the past, although non-thematically, within the compass of
being-in-itself; that is, in relief in the midst of the world.
Of course this being is still consciousness of — that is,
a foivitself; but it is a for-itself fixed in in-itself, and con-
sequently while a consciousness of the world, it is fallen
into the midst of the world. The meaning of realism, of
naturalism, and of materialism lies in the past; these three
philosophies are descriptions of the past as if it were present
The for-itself is then a double flight from the world; it
escapes its own being-ih-the-midst-of-the-world as a presence
to a world which it is fleeing. The possible is the free end
of the flight The for-itself can not flee toward a transcen-
dent which it is not, but only toward a transcendent which
it is. It is this fact which removes all possibility of surcease
from this perpetual flight. If I may use a down-to-earth im-
age for the sake of making my thought clearer, picture an
ass drawing behind him ^ cart. He attempts to get hold of a
278
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
carrot which has been fastened at the end of a stick which
in turn has been tied to the shaft of the cart. Every effort on
the part of the ass to seize the carrot results in advancing
the whole apparatus and the cart itself, which always re-
mains at the same distance from the ass. Thus we run after
a possible which our very running causes to appear, which
is nothing but our running itself, and which thereby is by
definition out of reach. We run toward ourselves and we
are — due to this very fact — the being which can not be re-
united with itself. In one sense the running is void of mean-
ing since the goal is never ^ven but invented and projected
proportionately as we run toward it In another sense we can
not refuse to it that meaning which it rejects since in spite
of everything possibility is the meaning of the for-itself.
Thus there is and there is not a meaning in the flight
Now in that very flight from the past which I am toward
the future which I am, the future is prefigured in relation
to the past at the same time that it confers on the past all
its meaning. The future is the past surpassed as a given in»
iteelf toward an in-itself which would be its own founda-
tion — that is, which would be in so far as I should have to
be it My possibility is the free recovery of my past in so far
as this recovery can rescue it by providing its foundation. I
flee the being without foundation ^hich I was toward the
founding act which I can be only in the mode of the I would
be. Thus the possible is the lack which the for-itself makes
itself be; that is, which is lacking to the present negation
m so far as it is a qualified negation (a negation which has
its quality outside itself in the past). As such the possible
is itself qualified — ^not by virtue of being a given, which
would be its own quality in the world of the in-itself, but
as an indication of the recovery which would found -the-
ekstatic qualification which the for-itself was. '
Thus thirst, for example, is three dimensional: it is a pres-
ent flight from a state of emptiness which the for-itself was.
This very flight confers on the given state its character of
emptiness or lack; in the past the lack could not be lack, for
the given can be “lacking” only if it is surpassed toward
~ -by a being which is its own transcendence. But this
flight a flight toward and it is this “toward”
v/hich gives fli^t its meaning. As such flight is itself a lack
which makes itself — that is, a constitution in the past of a
given as a lack or potentiality and at the same time the free
TRANSCENDENCE
279
recovery of the given by a for-itself which makes itself a
lack in the form, the “reflection-reflecting” — ^that is, as con-
sciousness of lack. Finally that toward which the lack is fled,
in so far as it causes itself to be conditioned in its being-a-
lack by that which it lacks, is the possibility that it is to be
a thirst which would be no longer a lack but a thirst-reple-
tion. The possible is the indication of the repletion; value,
as a phantom-being which surrounds and penetrates the for-
itself through and through, is the indication of a thirst
which would be simultaneously a given — as it “was it” —
and a recovery — as the game of “the reflection-reflecting”
constitutes it ekstatically. As one can see, we are dealing
here with a plenitude which determines itself as thirst. The
ekstatic relation past-present provides the outline of this
plenitude with the structure “thirst” as its meaning, and
the possible which I am must furnish its very density, its
fleshly plenitude, as reflection (reflexion).
Thus my presence to being which determines it as this is
a negation of the “this” in so far as I am also a qualified
lack beside the ^'this” To the extent that my possible is a
possible presence to being beyond being, the qualification of
my possible reveals a being-beyond-being as the being whose
co-presence is a co-presence strictly linked with a repletion
to-come. Thus absence in the world is revealed as a being
to-be-realized in so far as this being is correlative with the
possible-being which 1 lack. The glass of water appears as
about-to-be-drunk; that is, as the correlate of a thirst grasped
non-thetically and its very being as about to be satisfied.
But these descriptions, which all imply a relation to the fu-
ture of the world, will be clearer if we at present explain
how the time of the world or universal time is revealed to
consciousness on the ground of the original negation.
IV. THE TIME OF THE WORLD
Universal time comes into the world through the For-it-
self. The in-itself is not adapted to temporality precisely be-
cause it is in-itself and because temporality is the mode of
Unitary being in a being which is perpetually at a distance
from itself for itself. The For-itself, on the contrary, is tem-
porality, but it is not consciousness of temporality except
when it produces itself in the relation “reflective-reflected-
280 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
on.” In the unreflective mode the for-itself discovers tem-
porality on being— that is, outside. Universal temporality is
objective.
A. The Past
The “this” does not appear as a present which later wiU
have to become past and which before that was future. This
inkwell the moment I perceive it already exists in the three
temporal dimensions. In so far as I apprehend it as perma-
nence — i.e., as essence — it is already in the future although
I am not present to it in my actual presence but as about-to-
come-to-myself. By the same token, I can not apprehend it
except as having already been there in the world inasmuch
as I was already there myself as presence. In this sense there
exists no “synthesis of recognition” if we mean by that a
progressive operation of identification which by successive
organization of the “nows” would confer a duration on the
thing perceived. The For-itself directs the explosion of its
temporality against the whole length of the revealed in-itself
as though against the length of an immense and monotonous
waU of which it can not see the end. I am that original ne-
gation which I have to be in the mode of not-yet and of
already, beside the being which is what it is. If then we
suppose a consciousness arising in a motionless world beside
a unique being which is unchangeably what it is, this being
will be revealed with a past and a future of immutabUily
which will necessitate no “operation” of a synthesis and
which will be one with its very revelation. The operation
would be necessary only if the For-itself had to retain and
to constitute its own past by the same stroke. But due to the
mere fact that the in-itself is its own past as also its own fu-
ture, ^^e revelation of the in-itself can only be temporalized.
The this is revealed temporally not because it would be
refracted^ across an a priori form of inner meaning but be-
cause it is revealed to a revelation of which the very being
IS temporalization. Nevertheless the atemporality of being
is represented in its very revelation; in so far as it is grasped
through and in a temporality which temporalizes itself, the
this appears originally as temporal; but in so far as it is what
It is, It refuses to be its own temporality and merely reflects
time. In addition it reflects the internal ekstatic relation — ■
TRANSCENDENCE
281
which is at the source of temporality — as a purely objective
relation of exteriority. Permanence, as a compromise between
non-temporal identity and the ekstatic unity of temporaliza-
tion, will appear therefore as the pure slipping by of in-it-
self instants, little nothingnesses separated one from another
and reunited by a relation of simple exteriority on the sur-
' face of a being which preserves an atemporal immutability.
It is not true therefore that the non-temporality of being
escapes' us; on the contrary, it is given in time, it provides
the foundation for the mode of being of universal time.
In so far then as the For-itself “was” what it is, the in-
strument or thing appears to it as having been already there.
The For-itself can be presence to the this only as a presence
which was; all perception is in-itself, and without any “op-
eration” it is a recollection. Now what is revealed across the
ekstatic unity of Past and Present is an identical being. It is
not' apprehended as being the same as the past and the
present but as being it. Temporality is only a tool of vi-
sion. Yet this it which it is, the “this” already was. Thus
the this appears as having a past. But it refuses to be this
past; it only has it. Temporality in so far as it is grasped ob-
jectively as therefore a pure phantom, for it does not give
itself as the temporality of the For-itself nor as the tem-
porality which the in-itself has to be. At the same time the
transcendent Past, since it is in-itself by virtue of transcen-
dence, can not be as that which the Present has to be; the
Past is isolated in a phantom of Selbstdndigkeit. And as
each moment of the past is a “having-been Present,” this
isolation is pursued to the very interior of the Past. Conse-
quently the unchangeable this is revealed across a flickering
and an infinite parceling out of phantom in-itselfs. This is
how that glass or that table is revealed to me. They do not
endure; they are. Time flows over them. v
Of course someone will object that I merely fail to see
changes in the glass or table. But this is to introduce very
^appropriately a scientific point of view. Such a point of
view, which nothing justifies, is contradicted by our very
perception. The pipe, the pencil, all these beings which are
released entire in each one of their “profiles” and whose
permanence is wholly indifferent to the multiplicity of pro-
files, are transcendent to all temporality even though they
are revealed in temporality. The “thing” exists straightway
^ a “form”; that is, a whole which is not affected by any of
282 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the superficial parasitic variations which we can see on it
Each this is revealed with a law of being which determines
its threshold, its level of change where it will cease to be
what it is in order simply not to be. This law of being,
which expresses “permanence,” is an immediately revealed
structure of the essence of the “this”; it determines a limit-
of-potentiality in the “this” — ^that of disappearing from the
world. We shall return to this point. Thus the For-itself ap-"
prehends temporality on being, as a pure reflection which
plays on the surface of being without any possibility of mod-
ifying being. The scientist will fix this absolute, spectral,
nihilating quality of time m a concept under the name of
homogeneity. But the transcendent apprehension on the in-
itself of the ekstatic unity of the temporalizing For-itself is
effected as the apprehension of an empty form of temporal
unity without any being which founds that unity by being
it. Thus on the plane of Present-Past, there appears that
curious unity of the absolute dispersion which is external
temporality. Here each before and each after is an “in-itself ’
isolated from others by its indifferent exteriority, and here
these instants are reunited in the unity of one and the same
being. And this common being or Time is nothing other than
the very dispersion, conceived as necessity and substantiality.
This contradictory nature could appear only on the double
foundation of the For-itself and the In-itself. From this
standpoint in so far as scientific reflection aims at hypostasiz-
ing the relation of exteriority, being will be conceived — i.e.,
thought of an emptiness — ^not as a transcendence aimed at
across time but as a content which passes from instant into in-
stant. Better yet it will be conceived as a multiplicity of con-
tents, extern^ to one another, and strictly resembling one
another.
So far our description of universal temporalitj^ has been
attempted under the hypothesis that nothing may come from
being save its non-temporal immutability. But something
does come from being: what, for lack of a better term, we
shall call abolitions and apparitions. These apparitions and
abolitions ought to be the object of a purely metaphysical
elucidation, not an ontological one, for we can conceive of
their necessity neither from the standpoint of the structures
of being of the For-itself nor of those of the In-itself. Their
existence is that of a contingent and metaphysical fact. We
do not know exactly what comes from being in the phenome-
i
TRANSCENDENCE 283
non of apparition since this phenomenon is already the fact
of a temporalized “this.” Yet experience teaches us that there
are various upsurges and annihilations of the “this.” More-
over since we know that perception reveals the In-itself and
outside the In-itself nothing, we can consider the in-itself as
the foun^tion of these upsurges and of these annihilations.
In addition we see clearly that the principle of identity as the
law of being of the in-itself requires that the abolition and
the apparition be totally exterior to the in-itself which has
appeared or been abolished, for otherwise the in-itself would
at the same time both be and not be. The abolition can not
be that falling away from being which is an end. Only the
For-itself can know its falling away because it is to its itself
its own end. Being, a quasi-affirmation in which the affirm-
ing is coated over by the affirmed, exists without any inner
finitude in the peculiar tension of its “self-affirmation.” Its
“until then” is totally external to it. Thus the abolition does
not involve the necessity of an after, which can be mani-
fested only in a world and for an in-itself, but a quasi-after.
This quasi-after can be expressed thus: being-in-itself can
not effect the mediation between itself and its nothingness.
Similarly apparitions are not adventures of the appearing
being. That priority over itself which “adventure” would
suppose can be found only in the For-itself, for which both
apparition and end are inner adventures. Being is what it
is. It is without “putting itself into being,” without child-
hood or youth. That which has appeared is not a novelty to
itself; it is from the start being without any relation to a “be-
fore” which it would have to be as pure absence. Here again
we find a quasi-succession; i.e., on the part of that which
has appeared, there is a complete exteriority in relation to its
nothingness.
But in order for this absolute exteriority to be given in the
form of the “there is,” there must be already a world; that
is, ffie upsurge of a For-itself. The absolute exteriority of the
In-itself in relation to the In-itself is responsible for the fact
that even the very nothingness which is the quasi-before of
the apparition or the quasi-after of the abolition can find no
place in the plenitude of being. It is only within the unity
of a world and on the ground of a world that there can ap-
pear a this which was not or that there can be revealed that
relation-of-absence-of-relation which is exteriority. The noth-
nigness of being, which is priority in relation to an “ap-
284
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
peared” which “was not,” can come only retrospectively to a
world by a For-itself which is its own nothingness and its
own priority. Thus the upsurge and the annihilation of the
this are ambiguous phenomena; here again what comes to be-
ing by the For-itself is a pure nothingness, the not-being-yet
and the not-being-any-longer. The being which we are con-
sidering is not the foundation of it, nor the world as a total-
ity apprehended before or after. On the other hand, in so
far as the upsurge is revealed in the world by a For-itself
which is its own before and its own after, the apparition
is given first as an adventure; we apprehend the this, which
has appeared as being already there in the world, as its own
absence inasmuch as we ourselves were already present to a
world from which it was absent Thus the thing can arise
from its own nothingness. Here, however, we are not deal-
ing with a conceptual view of the mind but with an original
structure of perception. The experiments of the Gestalt
school show clearly that pure apparition is always grasped as
a dynamic upsurge; the appearance comes on the run to
being, on the ground of nothingness.
At the same time we have here the origin of the “princi-
ple of causality.” The ideal of causality is not the negation of
the “appeared” as such, as someone like Meyerson would
make it, nor is it the assigning of a permanent bond of ex-
teriority between two phenomena. The first causality is the
apprehension of the “appeared” before it appears as being
already there in its own nothingness so as to prepare its ap-
parition. Causality is simply the first apprehension of the
temporality of the “appeared” as an ekstatic mode of being.
But the adventurous character of the event, as the ekstatic
constitution of the apparition, disintegrates in the very per-
ception; the before and the after are fixed in its nothing-
ness-in-itself, the “appeared” in its indifferent self-identity;
the non-being of the “appeared” in that prior instant is re-
vealed as an indifferent plenitude of the being existing at
that instant; the relation of causality disintegrates into a pure
relation of exteriority between the “thises” prior to the “ap-
peared” and the “appeared” itself. Thus the ambiguity of
apparition and of abolition comes from the fact that they are
given, like the world, like space, like potentiality and instru-
mentality, like universal time itself, in the form of totalities
in perpetual disintegration.
Such then is the past of the world — made of homogeneous
'TRANSCENDENCE
285
instants connected one with another by a purely external rela-
tion. By means of its Past, the For-itself founds itself in
the In-itself. In the Past the For-itself, now become In-itself,
is revealed as being in the midst of the world: it is; has lost
its transcendence. And due to this fact its being is made past
in time; there is no difference between the Past of the For-
itself and the past of the world which was co-present with
it except that the For-itself has to be its own past. Thus
there is only one Past, which is the past of being or the
objective Past in which I was. My past is past in the world,
belonging to the totality of past being, which I am, which
I flee. This means that there is a coincidence for one of the
temporal dimensions between the ekstatic temporality which
I have to be and the time of the world as a pure given noth-
ingness. It is through the past that I belong to universal
temporality; it is through the present and the future that I
escape from it.
B. The Present
The Present of the For-itself is presence to being, and as
such it is not. But it is a revelation of being. The being
which appears to Presence is given as being in the Present.
That is why the present is given paradoxically as not being
at the moment when it is experienced and as being the unique
measure of Being in so far as it is revealed as being what it
is in the Present. Not that being does not extend beyond the
present, but this superabundance of being can be grasped
only through the instrument of apprehension which is the
Past — that is, as that which is no longer. Thus this book on
my table is in the present and it was (identical with itself)
in the Past. Thus the Present is reveled through original
temporality as universal being, and at the same time it is
nothing — ^nothing more than being; it is a slipping-past
alongside being, pure nothingness.
The preceding observations would seem to indicate that
nothing comes from being to the present except its being.
But this would be to forget that being is revealed to the For-
itself either as immobile or as in motion, and that the two
notions of motion and rest are in a dialectical relation. Now
motion can not be derived ontologically from the nature of
the For-itself nor from its fundamental relation to the In-
286 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
itself, nor from what we can discover originally in the
phenomenon of Being. A world without motion would be
conceivable. To be sure, we can not imagine the possibility
of a world without change, except by virtue of a purely for-
mal possibility, but change is not motion. Change is altera-
tion of the quality of the this; it is produced, as we have
seen, in a block by the upsurge or disintegration of a form.
Motion, on the contrary, supposes the permanence of the
quiddity. If a this were to be transferred from one place to
another and during this transfer were to undergo a radical
alteration of its being, this alteration would negate the mo-
tion since there would no longer be anything which was in
motion. Motion is pure change of place affecting a this which
remains otherwise unaltered as is shown clearly enough by
our assumption of the homogeneity of space. Since motion
could not be deduced from any essential characteristic of
existents in presence, it was denied by the Elcatic ontology;
it compelled Descartes in his ontology to take refuge in the
famous “snap of the finger.” Motion has the exact value of a
fact; it participates wholly in the complete contingency of be-
ing and must be accepted as a given. Of course we shall soon
see that a For-itself is necessary in order for motion to exist;
hence it is particularly difficult to designate exactly what in
pure motion comes from being. But in any case there is no
doubt that the For-itself here as elsewhere adds nothing to
being. Here as elsewhere it is pure Nothing which provides
the ground on which motion raises itself in relief. But while
we are forbidden by the very nature of motion to deduce it,
it is possible and even necessary for us to describe it. What
then are we to conclude is the meaning of motion?
It is believed that motion is a simple affection of being be-
cause after the motion the moving body is discovered to be
just as it was before. It has so often been posited as a prin-
ciple ^ that transfer does not distort the figure transferred
that it has appeared evident that motion is added to being
without modifying it. It is certain, as we have seen, that the
quiddity of the “this” remains unaltered. Nothing is more
typical of this conception than the resistance which has been
encountered by a theory like that of Fitzgerald concerning
contraction,” or like Einstein’s concerning “the variations of
mass,” because they seem particularly to attack what makes
the being of the moving body. Hence evidently comes the
principle of the relativity of motion, which is marvelously
TRANSCENDENCE
287
agreeable if the latter is an external characteristic of being
and if no intra-structural modification determines it. Motion
becomes^ then a relation so external to the being of its setting
that it amounts to saying that being is in motion and its en-
vironment at rest or conversely that the environment is in
motion and the being considered is at rest From this point
of view motion appears neither as a being nor as a mode of
being but as an entirely desubstantialized relation.
But the fact that &e moving body is identical with itself
at departure and at arrival — i.e., in file two states which en-
compass motion — does not predetermine in any respect what
it has been while it was in motion. It would amount to
saying that the water which boils in an autoclave undergoes
no transformation during the boiling, for the specious reason
that it presents the same characteristics when it is cold at the
start and when it is re-cooled. The fact that we can assign
different successive positions to the moving body during its
motion and that at each position it appears similar to itself
should not deter us, for these positions define the space tra-
versed and not motion itself. On the contrary, it is this mathe-
matical tendency to treat the moving body as a being at rest
that would change the length of a line without drawing it
out of its state of rest; it is this tendency which is at the
origin of the Eleatic paradoxes.
Thus the affirmation that being remains unchanged in its
being, whether it be at rest or in motion, should appear to
us as a simple postulate which we ought not to accept uncriti-
cally. In order to submit it to criticism let us return to the
Eleatic arguments and in particular to the one concerning
the arrow. The arrow, they tell us, when it passes by the posi-
tion AB “is” there, exactly as if it were an arrow at rest, with
the tip of its head on A and the tip of its tail on B. This ap-
pears evident if we admit that motion is superimposed on
being and that consequently nothing comes to decide wheth-
er being is in motion or at rest. In a word, if motion is an
accident of being, motion and rest are indistinguishable. The
arguments which are usually opposed to the most famous of
the Eleatic paradoxes, that of Achilles and the Tortoise, have
no bearing here. What good is it to object that the Eleatics
have reckoned on the infinite division of space without equal-
ly taking into account that of time? The question here con-
cerns neither position not the instant, but being. We ap-
proach a correct conception of the problem when we reply to
288
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the Eleatics that they have considered not motion but the
space which supports motion. But we are not limiting our-
selves to pointing out the question without resolving it. What
must be the being of the moving body in order for its quid-
dity to remain unchanged while in its being the moving body
is distinct from a being at rest?
If we try to clarify our objections to Z^eno’s arguments, we
establish that they originate in a certain naive conception of
motion. We admit that the arrow “passes” at AB, but it does
not seem to us that to pass a place is the equivalent of re-
maining there — i.e., of being there. Yet in this view we are
guilty of serious confusion, for we consider that the moving
object only passes AB (i.e., it never is there) and at the
same time we continue to take for granted that in itself it is.
Consequently the arrow simultaneously would be in itself and
would not be at AB. This is the origin of the Eleatic Para-
dox: how could the arrow not be at AB since at AB it is? In
other words in order to avoid the Eleatic paradox we must
renounce the generally admitted postulate according to which
being in motion preserves its being-in-itself. Merely to pass
at 4^ is a being-of-passage. What does it mean to pass? It
is simultaneously to be at a place and not to be there. At no
moment can it be said that the being of the passage is here,
without running the risk of abruptly stopping it there, but
neither can it be said that it is not, or that it is not there, or
that it is elsewhere. Its relation with the place is not a relation
occupation. But we have seen earlier that the location of
a “this” at rest was its relation of exteriority to the ground
inasmuch as this relation can collapse into a multiplicity of
external relations with other “thises” when the ground itself
disinte^ates into a multiplicity of figures.'* The foundation of
space is therefore the reciprocal exteriority which comes to
bemg dirough the For-itself and whose origin is the fact that
being is what it is. In a word it is being which defines its
place by revealing itself to a For-itself as indifferent to other
bemgs. This indifference is nothing but its very identity, its
absence from ekstatic reality as it is apprehended by a For-
itself which is already presence to other “thises.”
By the very fact therefore that the this is what it is, it
accuses a place, it is in a place— that is, it is put into rela-
L For-itself with other thises as having no relation
wit them. Space is the nothingness of relation apprehend-
■* Chapter Three, Section II.
TRANSCENDENCE
289
ed as relation by the being which is its own relation. The
fact of passing by a place, instead of being there, can there-
fore be interpreted only in terms of being. This means that
since place is founded by being, being is no longer suffi-
cient to found its place. It merely outlines it; its relations
of exteriority with other “thises” can not be established by
the For-itself because the latter must establish those relations
in terms of a “this” which is. However these relations could
not be annihilated because the being in terms of which they
are established is not a pure nothingness. The very “now” in
which they are established is already exterior to them; that
is, simultaneously with their revelation, there are already re-
vealed new relations of exteriority of which the “this” con-
sidered is the foundation and which are externally related to
the &st. But this continuous exteriority of spatial relations
which define the place of being can find its foundation only
in the fact that the this considered is exterior to itself. In
fact to say that the this passes by a place means that it is al-
ready no longer there when it is still there; that is, in rela-
tion to itself it is not in an ekstatic relation of being but in
a pure relation of exteriority. Thus there is “place” in so far
as the “this” is revealed as exterior to other “thises.” And
there is a passage at this place in so far as being is no longer
caught up in this exteriority but on the contrary is already ex-
terior to it. Thus motion is the being of a being which is ex-
terior to itself. The only metaphysical question which is pos-
ited omthe occasion of motion is that of exteriority to self.
What should we understand by that?
In motion being changes into nothing when it passes from
A to B. This means that its quality, in so far as it repre-
sents the being which is revealed as this to the For-itself, is
not transformed into another quality. Motion is in no way
similar to becoming; it does not change the essence of the
quality; neither does it actualize the quality. The quality re-
mains exactly what it is; but its mode of being is changed.
This red ball which rolls on the billiard table does not cease
to be red, but the ball is not this red which it is in the
same way now as it was the red when at rest. The red remains
suspended between abolition and permanence. In fact in so
far as it is already at B, it is exterior to what it was at A and
there is an annihilation of the red; but in so far as it redis-*
covers itself at C, beyond B, it is exterior to that very annihi-
290
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
lation. Thus through abolition it escapes being, and through
being it escapes abolition.
Therefore a category of “thises” is encountered in the
world which have the peculiar property of never being with-
out thereby becoming nothingness. The only relation which
the For-itself can originally apprehend on these thises is the
relation of exteriority to self. For since the exterior-
ity is nothing, a being must exist which is to itself its own
relation in order that there may be “exteriority to self.” In
short it is impossible for us to define in the pure terms of the
In-itself what is revealed to a For-itself as exteriority-to-self.
That exteriority can be discovered only by a being which is
already to itself over there what it is here — ^that is, a con-
sciousness. This exteriority-to-self, which appears as a pure
disorder of being — ^that is, as the impossibility which exists
for certain “thises” simultaneously to be themselves and to
be their own nothingness — ^this must be indicated by some-
thing which exists as a nothing in the world; that is, as a
substantiated nothing. Since exteriority-to-self is in no way
ekstatic, the relation of the moving body to itself is a pure,
relation of indifference and can be revealed only to a witness.
It is an abolition which can not be completed and an appari-
tion which can not be completed. This nothing which mea-
sures and signifies exteriority-to-self is the trajectory, as the
constitution of exteriority in the unity of a single being. The
trajectory is the line which is described — that is, an abrupt
appearance of synthetic unity in space, a counterfeit which
collapses immediately into the infinite multiplicity of exte-
riority. When the this is at rest, space is; when it is in mo-
tion space is engendered or becomes. The trajectory never
is, since it is nothing; it vanishes immediately into purely
external relations between different places; that is, in simple
exteriority of indifference or spatiality. Motion has no more
of being; it is the least-being of a being which can neither
arrive nor be abolished nor wholly be. Motion is the ^up-
surge of the exteriority of indifference at the very heart of
the in-itself. This pure vacillation of being is a contingent
venture of being. The For-itself can apprehend it only across
the temporal ekstasis and in an ekstatic permanent identifica-
tion of the moving body with itself. This identification dpes
not suppose any operation and in particular no “synthesis of
recognition”; for the For-itself it is only the unity of ekstatic
being of the Past with the Present. Thus the temporal identi-
TRANSCENDENCE
291
fication of the moving body with itself across the constant
positing of its own exteriority causes the trajectory to reveal
itself — that is, to cause space to arise in the form of an
evanescent becoming. By motion space is engendered in
time; motion extends the line as traced from externality to
self. The line vanishes at the same time as motion, and this
phantom of the temporal unity of space is founded contin-
uously in non-temporal space — ^that is, in the pure multiplic-
ity of dispersion which is without becoming.
The For-itself in the present is presence to being. But the
eternal identity of the permanent does not allow apprehend-
ing this presence as a reflection {reflet) on things since
in permanence nothing comes to differentiate what is from
what was. The present dimension of universal time would
therefore be inapprehensible if there were no motion. It is
motion which in the pure present determines universal time.
First because universd time is revealed as present vacillation;
already in the past it is no longer anything but an evanescent
line, like the wake of a ship which fades away; in the future
it is not at all, for it is unable to be its own project. It is like
the steady progression of a lizard on the w^. Moreover
its being has the inapprehensible ambiguity of the instant,
for one could not say either that it is or that it is not; in ad-
dition it no sooner appears than it is already surpassed and
exterior to itself.
Therefore universal time corresponds perfectly to the Pres-
ent of the For-itself: the exteriority to self of the being which
can neither be nor not be returns to the For-itself an image —
projected on the level of the In-itself — of a being which
has to be what it is not and to not-be what it is. The whole
difference lies in that which separates exteriority-to-self —
where being is not in order to be its own exteriority, but “is
to-be,” rather, through the identification of an ekstatic wit-
ness — ^from the pure temporalizing ekstasis where being has
to be what it is not. The For-itself makes its present known
to itself through that which moves; it is its own present in
simultaneity with actual motion; it is motion which will be
charged with realizing universal time, in so far as the For-it-
self makes known to itself its own present through the present
of the moving body. This realization will give importance
to the reciprocal exteriority of instants since the present of
the moving body is defined — because of the very nature
of motion — as exteriority to its own past and exteriority
292
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
to that exteriority. The infinite division of time is founded in
that absolute exteriority.
C. The Future
The original future is the possibility of that presence which
I have to be beyond the real to an in-itself which is beyond
the real in-itself. My future involves as a future co-presence
the outline of a future world, and as we have seen, it is this
future world which is revealed to the For-itself which I will
be; it is not the true possibilities of the For-itself, for only
the reflective regard can know these. Since my possibles
are the meaning of what I am and arise straightway as a be-
yond the in-itself to which I am presence, the future of the
in-itself which is revealed to my future is in direct, strict con-
nection with the real to which I am presence. The future of
^e in-itself is the present in-itself modified, for my future
is nothing other than my possibilities of presence to an in-it-
plf which I will have modified. Thus the future of the world
is revealed^ to my future. It is made from the scale of possi-
bilities which runs from simple permanence and the pure
essence of the thing on up to potencies. As soon as I fix the
es^nce of the thing, as soon as I apprehend it as table or
mkwell, I am already there in the future: first because its
essence can only be a co-presence to my further possibility of
not-being-any-more-than-this-negation, and second because
me permanence and the very instrumentality of the table or
inkwell refer us to the future. We have suflSciently developed
these observations in preceding sections so that we need
^t dwell on them here. What we wish to point out is only
^ at everything, from the moment of its appearance as an
mstrumental-thing, immediately houses certain of its struc-
tures and properties in the future.
of the appearance of the world and of
me ttuses there exists a universal future. Yet we have
noted e^her that every future “state” of the world remains
ange o it m the full reciprocal exteriority of indifference,
ere are certain futures in the world which are defined by
become autonomous probables, which are not
P a ized but which are as probables, as fully constituted
nows, with their content well determined but not yet real-
TRANSCENDENCE 293
ized. These futures belong to each “this” or collection of
“thises,” but they are outside.
What then is the universal future? We must view it as
the abstract context of that hierarchy of equivalents which
MG- the futures, a container of reciprocal exteriorities which
is itself exteriority, a sum of in-itselfs which is itself in-it-
seh. That is, whatever may be the probable which is to pre-
vail, there is and there will be a future. But due to this very
fact, that future, indifferent and external to the present and
-composed of “nows,” each one indifferent to the others and
reunited by the substantiated relation of before-after (in so
far as this relation, emptied of its ekstatic character, has no
longer anything but the meaning of an external negation) —
this future is a series of empty containers reunited with one
another in the unity of dispersion. In this sense the future
sometimes appears as an urgency and a threat in so far as I
strictly tie the future of a this to its present by the project of
my own possibilities beyond the co-present. But sometimes
this threat disintegrates into pure exteriority, and I no longer
apprehend the future except under the aspect of a pure for-
mal container, indifferent to what fills it and homogeneous
with space, as a simple law of exteriority. And finally some-
times the future is discovered as a nothingness in-itself, in-
asmuch as it is pure dispersion beyond being.
Thus the temporal dimensions, across which the non-tem-
poral this is given to us with its very atemporality, assume
new qualities when they appear on the object: being-in-itself,
objectivity, the exteriority of indifference, absolute dispersion.
Time, in so far as it is revealed to an ekstatic temporality
which temporalizes itself, is everywhere a self-transcendence
and a referring of the before to the after and of the
after to the before. But this sclf-transcendencc, in so far
as it causes itselJf to be apprehended on the in-itself, does not
have to be it; it is made-to-be in it. The cohesion of Time is
a pure phantom, the objective reflection (reflet) of the ekstat-
ic project of the For-itself toward itself and &e cohesion in
motion of human Reality. But this cohesion has no raison
d'Stre. If Time is considered by itself, it immediately dis-
solves into an absolute multiplicity of instants which consid-
ered separately lose all temporal nature and are reduced
purely and simply to the total atemporality of the this. Thus
Time is pure nothingness in-itself, which can seem to have a
being only by the very act in which the For-itself overleaps it
294 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
in order to utilize it This being, however, is that of a particu-
lar figure which is raised on the undifferentiated ground of
time and which we call the lapse of time. In fact our first
apprehension of objective time is practical: it is while being
my possibilities beyond co-present being that I discover ob-
jective time as the worldly correlate of nothingness which
separates me from my possible. From this point of view time
appears as a finite, organized form in the heart of an indef-
inite dispersion. The lapse of time is the result of a compres-
sion of time at the heart of an absolute decompression, and it
is the project of ourselves toward our possibilities which
realizes the compression. This compression of time is cer-
tainly a form of dispersion and of separation, for it expresses
in the world the distance which separates me from myself.
But on the other hand, since I project myself toward a possi-
ble only across an organized series of dependent possibles
which are what I have to be in order to and since
their non-thematic and non-positional revelation is given in
the non-positional revelation of the major possible toward
which I project myself, time is revealed to me as an objective,
temporal form, as an organized echeloning of probabilities.
This objective form or lapse is like the trajectory of my act
Thus time appears through trajectories. But just as spa-
tial trajectories decompose and collapse into pure static spa-
tiality, so the temporal trajectory collapses as soon as it is not
simply lived as that which objectively implies our expectation
of ourselves. In fact the probables which are revealed to me
tend naturally to be isolated as in-itself probables and to
occupy a strictly separated fraction of objective time. Then
the lapse of time disappears, and time is revealed as the shim-
mer of nothingness on the surface of a strictly atemporal being.
V. KNOWLEDGE
Thk rapid outline of the revelation of the world to the
For-itself enables us now to form certain conclusions. We
shall grant to idealism that the being of the For-itself is
^owledge of being, but we must add that this knowledge
has being. The identity of the being of the For-itself and
of knowledge does not come from the fact that knowledge is
the measure of being but from the fact that the For-itself
■ TRANSCENDENCE
295
makes known to itself what it is, through the in-itself;
that is, from the fact that in its being it is a relation to be-
ing. Knowledge is nothing other than the presence of being
to the For-itself, and the For-itself is only the nothing which
realizes that presence. Thus knowledge is by nature ekstatic
being, ^d because of that fact it is confused with the ekstat-
ic being of the For-itself. The For-itself does not exist in
order subsequently to know; neither can we say that it exists
only in so far as it knows or is known, for this would be to
make being vanish into an infinity regulated by particular
bits of knowledge. Knowing is an absolute and primitive
event; it is the absolute upsurge of the For-itself in the midst
of being and beyond being, in terms of the being which it
is not and as the negation of that being and a self-nihila-
tion. In a word, by a radical reversal of the idealist position,
knowledge is reabsorbed in being. It is neither an attribute
nor a function nor an accident of being; but there is only
being. From this point of view it appears necessary to aban-
don the idealist position entirely, and in particular it becomes
possible to hold that the relation of the For-itself to the
In-itself is a fundamental ontological relation. At the end of
this book we shall even be able to consider this articulation
of the For-itself in relation to the In-itself as the perpetu-
ally moving outline of a quasi-totality which we can call
Being. From the point of view of this totality the upsurge
of the For-itself is not only the absolute event for the For-
itself; it is also something which happens to the In-itself,
the only possible adventure of the In-itself. In fact every-
thing happens as if the For-itself by its very nihilation con-
stituted itself as “consciousness of that is, as if by its
very transcendence it escaped that law of the In-itself in
which the affirmation is pasted over by the afiirmed. The For-
itself by its self-negation becomes the affirmation of the In-
itself. The intentional affirmation is like the reverse of the
internal negation; there can be affirmation only by a being
which is its own nothingness and of a being which is not
the affirming being. But then in the quasi-totality of Being,
affirmation happens to the In-itself; it is the adventure of the
In-itself to be affirmed. This affirmation which could not be
effected as the affirmation of self by the In-itself without
destroying its being-in-itself, happens to the In-itself as the
affirmation is realized by the For-itself. The affirmation is like
a passive ekstasis of the In-itself which leaves the in-itself
296 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
unchanged yet which is achieved in the in-itself and from
the standpoint of the in-itself. All this happens as if the For-
itself had a Passion to lose itself in order that the afl^mation
“world” might come to the In-itself. Of course this afl5rma-
tion exists only for the For-itself; it is the For-itself itseh-
and disappears with it. But it is not in the For-itself, for it
is an ekstasis. If the For-itself is one of its terms (the affirm-
ing), then the other term, the In-itself, is really present in
it. The world which I discover exists outside on being.
To realism, on the other hand, we shall grant that it is
being which is present to consciousness in knowledge and
that the For-itself adds nothing to the In-itself except the
very fact that there is In-itself; that is, the affirmative nega-
tion. Indeed we have undertaken the task of showing that
the world and the instrumental-thing, space and quantity,
and universal time are all pure hypostasized nothingnesses
which in no way modify the pure being which is revealed
through them. In this sense everything is given, everything
is present to me without distance and in its complete reality.
Nothing of what I see comes from me; there is nothing out-
side what I see or what I could see. Being is everywhere -
around me; it seems that I can touch it, grasp it; representa-
tion, as a psychic event, is a pure invention of philosophers.
But from this being which "invests me” on every side and
from which nothing separates me, I am separated precisely
by nothing; and this nothing because it is nothingness is im-
passable. “There is” being because I am the negation of being,
and worldliness, spatiality, quantity, instrumentality, tempo-
rality — all come into being only because I am the negation of
being. T^ese add nothing to being but are the pure, nihilat-
ed conditions of the “there is”; they only cause the “there
is” to be realized. But these conditions which are nothing
septate me more radically from being than prismatic dis-
tortions, across which I might still hope to discover being.
To say that there is being is nothing, and yet it is to effect
a total metamorphosis — since there is being only for a For-
itself. It^ is not in its own quality that being is relative to
the For-itself, nor in its being, and thereby we escape from
Kantian relativism. Being is relative to the for-itself in its
^ing there” since the For-itself in its internal negation
amms what can not be affirmed, knows being such as it is
when, ffie “such as^ it is” can not belong to being. In this
sense the For-itself is immediate presence to being, and yet at
TRANSCENDENCE
297
the same time it slips in as an infinite distance between itself
and being. This is because knowing has for its ideal being-
what-one-knows and for its original stnictufe not-being-what-
is-known. Worldliness, spatiality, etc., only cause this not-
being to be expressed. Thus I rediscover myself everywhere
between myself and being as the nothing wlfich is not being.
The world is human. We can see the very particular posi-
tion of consciousness:' being is everywhere, opposite me,
around me; it weighs down on me, it besieges me, and I am
perpetually referred from being to being; that table which
is there is being and nothing more; that rock, that tree, that
landscape — ^being and nothing else. I want to grasp this
being and I no longer find anything but myself. This is be-
cause knowledge, intermediate between being and non-being,
refers me to absolute being if I want to make knowledge sub-
jective and refers me to myself when I think to grasp the
absolute. The very meaning of knowledge is what it is not
and is not what it is; for in order to know being such as it
is, it would be necessary to be that being. But there is this
“such as it is” only because I am not the being which I
know; and if I should become it, then the “such as it is”
would vanish and could no longer even be thought. We are
not dealing here either with scepticism — ^which supposes
precisely that the such as it is belongs to being — or with
relativism. Knowledge puts us in the presence of the absolute,
and there is a truth of knowledge. But this truth, although
releasing to us nothing more and nothing less than the ab-
solute, remains strictly human.
Perhaps some may be surprised that we have treated the
problem of knowing without raising the question of the
body and the senses or even once referring to it. It is not my
purpose to misunderstand or to ignore the role of the body. -
But what is important above all else, in ontology as else-
where, is to observe strict order in discussion. Now the body,
whatever may be its function, appears first as the known.
We can not therefore refer knowledge back to it or discuss
It before we have defined knowing, nor can we derive know-
Hig in its fundamental structure from the body in any way or
manner whatsoever. Furthermore the body — our body — has
its peculiar characteristic the fact that it is essentially
mat which is known by the Other, What I know is the
body of another, and the essential facts which I know con-
cerning my own body come from the way in which others
298
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
see it. Thus the nature of my body refers me to the exis-
tence of others and to my being-for-others. I discover with
it for human reality another mode of existence as fundamen-
tal as being-for-itself, and this I shall call being-for-others.
If I want to describe in an exhaustive manner the relation of
man to being, I must now attempt the study of this new
structure of my being — ^the For-others. Within one and the
same upsurge &e being of human reality must be for-itself-
for-others.
part THRER
^adstetvce
o£
1.
p^lOl
cealW “ iot o* .„ teaW.'®^
“^atiA8 *i>\sVe3tA^f tViat *^ ,1 -9^© '^‘^vpttisevv*^ % wt)© ®‘’
**'*'ft>*'6
onto\o^
to _.,r.et 11 _^^ot-tJV©*
laod© -^^r'vfe^av© ^ ciisciovjs ^
«\ seu-r" . „ p-«ai
It is
1»
of 80^®
-f /I
am-
it is a''^''" sq a Ota a»^ , .sna * ot my -,
teutiooaV^^ is "^^’^tiaxa^® axi
W stoioe ^ .„ comp'®?- *? sba®® ®
-^ss^rs^-r:;
app©H'J
302
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
phenomenon of reflection. In fact no matter what results one
can obtain in solitude by the religious practice of shame, it is
in its primary structure shame before somebody. I have just
made an awkward or vulgar gesture. This gesture clings to
me; I neither judge it nor blame it. I simply live it. I realize
it in the mode of for-itself. But now suddenly I raise my
head. Somebody was there and has seen me. Suddenly I realize
the vulgarity of my gesture, and I am ashamed. It is certain
that my shame is not reflective, for the presence of another in
my consciousness, even as a catalyst, is incompatible with the
reflective attitude; in the field of my reflection I can never
meet with anything but the consciousness which is mine. But
the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and
me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other.
^ By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the posi-
tion of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is
as an object that I appear to the Other. Yet this object which
has appeared to the Other is not an empty image in the mind
of another. Such an image, in fact, would be imputable wholly
to the Other and so could not “touch” me. I could feel irrita-
tion, or anger before it as before a bad portrait of myself
which gives to my expression an ugliness or baseness which
I do not have, but I could not be touched to the quick.
Shame is by nature recognition. I recognize that I am as the
Other sees me. There is however no question of a com-
I^rison between what I am for myself and what I am for
the Other as if I found in myself, in the mode of being of the
For-itself, an equivalent of what I am for the Other. In the first
place this comparison is not encountered in us as the re-
^ concrete psychic operation. Shame is an immediate
shudder which runs through me from head to foot wthout
any mscimsive preparation. In addition the comparison is im-
possible; I am unable to bring about any relation between what
am m &e mtunacy of the For-Itself, without distance, with-
and this unjustifiable being-in-
t 1,1 ^ Other. There is no standard here, no
a e o coirelation. Moreover the very notion of vulgarity
m^ les an mter-monad relation. Nobody can be vulgar all
revealed to me what I was;
of being which can sup-
befnrp Cations. This being was not in me potentially
e appearance of the Other, for it could not have
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
303
found any place in the For-itself. Even if some power had
been pleased to endow me with a body wholly constituted
before it should be for-others, still my vulgarity and my awk-
wardness could not lodge there potentially; for they are mean-
ings and as such they surpass the body and at the same
time refer to'a witness capable of understanding them and to
the totality of my human reality. But this new being which
appears for the other does not reside in the Other; I am re-
sponsible for it as is shown very well by the education
system which consists in making children ashamed of what
they are.
Thus shame is shame of oneself before the Other; these
two structures are inseparable. But at the same time I need the
Other in order to realize fully all the structures of my being.
The For-itself refers to the For-others. Therefore if we wish
to grasp in its totality the relation of man’s being to being-in-
itself, we can not be satisfied with the descriptions outlined
in the earlier chapters of this work. We must answer two far
more formidable questions: first that of the existence of the
Other, then that of the relation of my being to the being of
the Other.
n. THE REEF OF SOLIPSISM
It is strange that the problem of Others has never truly dis-
turbed the realists. To the extent that the realist takes every-
tl^g as given, doubtless it seems to him that the Other is
given. In the midst of the real what is more real than the
Other? The Other is a thinking substance of the same
essence as I am, a substance which will not disappear into
primary and secondary qualities, and whose essential struc-
ture! fimd in myself. Yet for all that realism attempts to
account for knowledge by an action of the world upon the
jinking substance, it has not been concerned with establish-
ing an immediate reciprocal action of thinking substances upon
each other. It is through the mediacy of the world that
diey communicate. My body as a thing in the world
and the Other’s body are the necessary intermediaries between
the Other’s consciousness and mine. The Other’s soul is
therefore separated from mine by all the distance which sep-
^ates first my soul from my body, then my body from the
Other’s body, and finally the Other’s body from his soul.
304
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
And if it is as yet not certain that the relation of the For-itself
to the body is an external relation (we shall have to deal with
this problem later), at least it is evident that the relation
of my body to the Other’s body is a relation of pure, indiffer-
ent exteriority. If the souls are separated by their bodies, they
are distinct as this inkwell is distinct from this book; that is,
we can not conceive of the immediate presence of the one
in the other. And even if we admit that my soul can be imme-
diately present in the Other’s body, I still have to overcome
all the density of a body before I touch his soul. Therefore
if realism bases its certitude upon the presence “in per-
son” of the spatial-temporal thing in my consciousness, it can
not lay claim to the same evidence for the reality of the
Other’s souk since by this very admission, the Other’s soul
does not give itself “in person” to mine. It is an absence, a
meaning; the body points to it without delivering it. In short,
in a philosophy based on intuition, there is provided no in-
tuition of the soul of the Other. But if we are not to make a
mere play on words, this means that realism provides no place
for the mtuition of the Other. It would be of no use to say
that at least the Other’s body is given to us and that this body
is a certain presence of the Other or of a part of the Other. It
is true that the body belongs to the totality which we call
“human reality” as one of its structures. But to be exact the
body is the body of a man only in so far as it exists in the
indissoluble unity of this totality, just as the organ is a living
organ only in the totality of the organism. Realism in taking
this position and presenting us with a body not enveloped in
human totality but apart, like a stone or a tree or a piece of
wax, has killed the body as surely as the physiologist who with
his scalpel separates a piece of flesh from the totality of the
living being. It is not the Other's body which is present to the
realist intuition but a body, a body which doubtless has partic-
ular aspects and a particular exts but which belongs neverthe-
less^ to the great class of bodies. If it is true that for a
spiritual realism, the soul is easier to know than the body, still
the body will be easier to know than the Other’s soul.
To tell the truth, the realist is not much concerned with
this problem; that is because he takes the existence of others
as certain. This is why the realistic and positivistic psychology
century, taking for granted the existence of
my fellow-man, ^ occupied itself exclusively with establishing
- Ways by which I know this existence and read upon the
THE EXISTENCE OF -OTHERS
305
body the nuances of a consciousness which is strange to me.
The body, it wUl be said, is an object whose demands
a particular interpretation.. The hypothesis which gives the
best account of its behavior is that of a consciousness which
is analogous to my own consciousness and whose various emo-
tions the body reflects. It remains to explain how we arrive
at this hypothesis. We will be told at one time that it is by
analogy with what I know of myself and again that it is ex-
perience which teaches us, for example, to interpret the sud-
den reddening of a face as the forewarning of blows and angry
cries. It will be freely admitted that this procedure can only
give us a probable knowledge. It remains always possible^ that
the Other is only a body. If animals are machines, why
shouldn’t the man whom I see pass in the street be one? What
I apprehend on this face is nothing but the elffect of certain
muscular contractions, and they in turn are only the effect
of a nervous impulse of which I know the course. Why
not reduce the ensemble of these reactions to simple or con-
ditioned reflexes? But the majority of psychologists remain
convinced of the existence of the Other as a total reality of
the same structure as their own. For them the existence of
others is certain, and the knowledge which we have of them is
probable. We can see here the sophistry of realism. Actually
we ought to reverse the terms of this proposition and recog-
nize that if the Other is accessible to us only by means of the
knowledge which we have of him, and if this knowledge is
only conjectural, then the existence of the Other is only con-
jectural, and it is the role of critical reflection to determine its
exact degree of probability. Thus by a curious reversal, the
realist, because he has posited the reality of the external world,
is forced to return to idealism when he confronts the existence
of others. If the body is a real object really acting on thinking
substance, the Other becomes a pure representation, whose
esse is a simple percipi; that is, one whose existence is
measured by the knowledge which we have of it. The more
recent theories of Einfiihlungy of sympathy, and of forms
serve only to perfect the description of our ways of making
the Other present, but they do not put the debate on its true
ground: that is, the Other is first perceived or he appears in
experience as a particular form before all habitude; and in
the absence of any analogous inference the fact remains that
the object, signifying and perceived, the expressive form re-
*Tr. The French reads probable, which I feel certain must be an error.
306
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
fers purely and simply to a human totality whose existence
remains purely and simply conjectural.
If realism thus refers us to idealism, is it not advisable to
adopt immediately the perspective of critical idealism? Since
the Other is “my representation,” is it not better to question
this representation at the heart of a system which reduces the
ensemble of objects to a connected grouping of representa-
tions and which measures all existence by the knowledge
which I have of it?
We shall, however, find little help in the Kantians. In
fact they, preoccupied with establishing the universal laws of
subjectivity which are the same for all, never dealt with the
question of persons. The subject is only the common essence
of these persons; it would no more allow us to determine the
multiplicity of persons than the essence of man, in Spinoza’s
system, permits one to determine that of concrete men. At
&st then it seems that Kant placed the problem of others
among those matters which were not within the province of
his critique. However let us look more closely. The Other as
such is given in our experience; he is an object and a particu-
lar object. Kant adopted the point of view of the pure subject
in order to determine the conditions of possibility not only for
an object in general but for the various categories of objects:
the physical object, the mathematical object, the beautiful or
ugly object, and the one which presents teleological character-
istics. In this connection Kant has been criticized for
lacunas in his work, and some— following Dilthey, for ex-
ample ^have wished to establish the conditions of possi-
bility for the historical object — i.e., to attempt a critique of
historical reason. Similarly if it is true that the Other repre-
sents a particular t5^e of object which is discovered to our
experience, then it is necessary even within the perspective
OT a rigorous^ Kantianism to ask how the Imowledge of the
Other is possible; that is, to establish the conditions of possi-
bility for the experience involving others.
ArtuaJly it would be completely erroneous to put the
probl^ of the Other and that of noumenal realities on the
same footmg. Of course, if certain “Others” exist and if they
^e similar to me, the question of their intelligible existence
an e posed for them as that of my noumenal existence
w pose for me; to be sure also, the same reply will be valid
thnn noumenal existence can only be
thought, not conceived. But when I aim at the Other in my
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
307
daily experience, it is by no means a noumenal reality that I
am aiming at; neither do I apprehend or aim at my intelligible
reality when I obtain knowledge of my emotions or of my
empirical thoughts. The Other is a phenomenon which refers
to other phenomena — ^to a phenomenomof-anger which the
Other feels toward me, to a series of thoughts which appear to
him as phenomena of his inner sense. What I aim at in the
Other is nothing more than what I find in myself. But these
phenomena are radically distinct from all other phenomena.
In the first place the appearance of the Other in my ex-
perience is manifested by the presence of organized forms
such as gestures and expression, acts and conducts. These
organized forms refer to an organizing unity which on princi-
ple is located outside of our experience. The Other’s anger, in
so far as it appears to his inner sense and is by nature refused
to my apperception, gives the meaning and is perhaps the
cause of the series of phenomena which I apprehend in my
experience under the name of expression or gestures. Tlie
Other ^ the sjmthetic unity of his experiences and as both
will and passion comes to organize my experience. It is not a
question of the pure and simple action of an unknowable
noumenon upon my sensibility but of the constitution of con-
nected groups of phenomena within the field of my ex-
perience by a being who is not me. These phenomena, un-
like all others, do not refer to possible experiences but to
experiences which on principle are outside my experience and
belong to a system which is inaccessible to me. But on the
other hand, the condition of possibility for all experience is
that the subject organize his impressions into a connected
system. Thus we find in things “only what we have put into
them.” The Other therefore can not without contradiction
appear to us as organizing our experience; there would be in
this an over-determination of the phenomenon.
Can we make use of causality here? This question is well
designed to show the ambiguous character of the Other in a
Kantian philosophy. Causality could in fact link only phe-
nomena to each oAer. But to be exact, the anger which the
Other feels is one phenomenon, and the furious expression
which I perceive is another and different phenomenon. Can
there be a causal connection between them? This would con-
forra to their phenomenal nature, and in this sense I am not
prevented from considering the redness of Paul’s face as the
effect of his anger; this is a part of my ordinary afiSxmation.
308 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
But on the other hand, causality has meaning only if it links
the phenomena of one and the same experience and contrib-
utes to constituting that experience. Can it serve as a bridge
between two experiences which are radically separated? Here
we must note that by using causality in this capacity I shall
make it lose its nature as an ideal unification of empirical
appearances. Kantian causality is a unification of the moments
of my time in the form of irreversibility. Now are we to admit
that it will unify my time with that of the Other? What
temporal relation is to be established between the decision to
express himself, which is a phenomenon appearing in the
woof of the Ofiier’s experience, and the expression which is
a phenomenon of my experience? Is it simultaneity? Succes-
sion? But how can an instant of my time be in a relation of
simultaneity or of succession with an instant in the Other’s
time? Even if a pre-established harmony (which is, however,
incomprehensible in a Kantian perspective) could effect a
correspondence of instant with instant in the two times con-
sidered, they would still remain two times unrelated since for
each of them the unifying synthesis of moments is an act of
the subject The universality of time with Kant is only the
universality of a concept; it means only that each temporality
must possess a definite structure, that the conditions of possi-
bility for a temporal experience are valid for all temporalities.
But this identity of temporal essence does not prevent the in-
communicable diversity of times any more than the identity of
the essence of man prevents the incommunicable diversity of
human consciousness. Thus since a relation between conscious-
nesses is by nature unthinkable, the concept of the Other can
not constitute our experience; it must be placed along with
teleological concepts among the regulative concepts. The
Other therefore belongs to the category of “as if.” The Other
is an a priori h5^othesis with no justification save the unity
which it permits to operate in our experience, an hypothesis
which can not be thought without contradiction. It is possi-
ble, so far as the pure exercise of knowledge is concerned,
of the action of an intelligible reality on our sen-
si mty, but it is not even thinkable that a phenomenon whose
reality is strictly relative to its appearance in the Other’s ex-
perience should really act on a phenomenon of my experience.
admitted that the action of an intelligible reality
simultaneously on my experience and on
that of the Other (in the sense that the intelligible reality
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
309
would affect the Other to the same degree that it would af-
fect me), it would still remain radically impossible to establish
or even to postulate a parallelism and a table of correlation
between two systems which are spontaneously constituted.^
But on the other hand does the quality of a regulative concept
really fit the concept of the Other? It is not a question of
establishing a stronger unity between the phenomena of my
experience in the manner of a purely formal concept which
would only allow the discovery of details in the objects which
appear to me. It is not a question of a kind of a priori
hypothesis not extending beyond the field of my experience
but inspiring new investigation within the very limits of this
field. The perception of the Other-as-object refers to a
coherent system of representations, and this system is
not mine. This means that in my experience the Other is
not a phenomenon which refers to my experience but that on
principle he refers himself to phenomena located outside of all
experience which is possible for me. Of course the concept of
the Other allows discoveries and predictions within the heart
of my system of representations, a contraction in the web of
phenomena: thanks to the hypothesis of Others I can antici-
pate this gesture as coming from that expression. But this con-
cept is not presented as being like those scientific notions
(imaginary ones, for example) or like instruments which in-
tervene in the course of a physical calculation, which are
not presented in the empirical statement of the problem and
which are eliminated from the results. The concept of the
Other is not purely instrumental. Far from the concepts exist-
ing in order to serve to unify phenomena, the truth is that
certain categories of phenomena seem to exist only for the
concept of the Other.
*^6 existence of a system of meanings and experiences
radically distinct from my own is the fixed skeletal framework
located by diverse series of phenomena in their very flow.
This framework, which on principle is external to my ex-
perience, is gradually filled in. We can never apprehend the
relation of that Other to me and he is never given, but gradu-
we constitute him as a concrete object. He is not the in-
strument which serves to predict an event in my experience.
Even if we agreed to adopt the Kantian metaphysics of nature and
6 catalogue of principles 'which Kant has drawn up, it would be possible
0 conceive of radically different types of physics based on these principles.
310 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
but there are events in my experience which serve to consti-
tute the Other qua Other; that is, as a system of representa-
tions out of reach, as a concrete and knowable object What I
constantly aim at across my experiences are the Other’s feel-
ings, the Other’s ideas, the Other’s volitions, the Other’s char-
acter. This is because the Other is not only the one whom I
see but the one who sees me. I aim at the Other in so far
as he is a connected system of experiences out of reach in
which I figure as one object among others. But to the extent
that I strive to determine the concrete nature of this system
of representations and the place which I occupy there as an
object, I radically transcend the field of my experience. I am
concerned with a series of phenomena which on principle can
never be accessible to my intuition, and consequently I exceed
the lawful limits of my knowledge. I seek to bind together
experiences which will never be my experiences, and conse-
quently this work of construction and unification can
in no way serve for the unification of my own experience. To
the extent that the Other is an absence he escapes nature.
Therefore the Other can not be described as a regulative con-
cept. Of course Ideas like the World, for example, also on
principle escape my experience, but at least they are re-
ferred back to it and have meaning only through it The
Other, on the contrary, is presented in a certain sense as the
radical negation of my experience, since he is the one for
whom I am not subject but object Therefore as the subject
of knowledge I strive to determine as object the subject who
denies my character as subject and who himself determines
me as object
Thus the Other within the perspective of idealism can
be considered neither as a constitutive concept nor as a regula-
tive concept of my knowledge. He is conceived as real, and
yet I can not conceive of his real relation to me. I construct
hm as object and yet he is never released by, intuition. I posit
him as subject, and yet it is as the object of my thoughts that
I consider him. There remain then only two solutions for the
idealist: either to get rid of the concept of the Other com-
pletely and prove that he is useless to the constitution of my
experience, or to affirm the real existence of the Other — ^that
IS, to posit a real, extra-empirical communication between con-
sciousnesses.
. solution is known by the name of solipsism. Yet
It It IS formulated in conformity with its denomination as the
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
311
affirmation of my ontological solitude, it is a pure metaphysi-
cal hypothesis, perfectly unjustified and gratuitous; for it
amounts to saying that outside of me nothing exists and so it
goes beyond Ae limits of the field of my experience. But if
it is presented more modestly as a refusd to leave the solid
ground of experience and as a positive attempt not to make
use of the concept of the Other, then it is perfectly logical;
it remains on the level of critical positivism, and although it is
opposed to the deepest inclinations of our being, it derives its
justification from the contradictions of the notion of Others
considered in the idealist perspective. A psychology which
wants to be exact and objective, like the “behaviorism” of
Watson, is really only solipsism as a working hypothesis. It
will not try to deny within the field of my experience the
presence of objects, which we shall call “psychic beings”
but will merely practice a sort of kiroxn^ respect to the
existence of systems of representations organized by a subject
and located outside my experience.
Confronted with this solution, Kant and the majority of
post-Kantiahs continue to affirm the existence of the Other.
But they can refer only to common sense or to our deep-
rooted tendencies to justify their affirmation. We know that
Schopenhauer speaks of the solipsist as “a madman shut up
in an impregnable blockhouse.” What a confession of im-
potehcel It is -in fact by this position with regard to the exis-
tence of the Other that we suddenly explode the structure of
idealism and fall back into a metaphysical realism. First of all
by positing a plurality of closed systems which can com-
municate only through the outside, we implicitly re-establish
the notion of substance. Of course these systems are non-sub-
stantial since they are systems of representation. But their
reciprocal exteriority is an exteriority in itself; it is without
being known; we do mot even apprehend the effects with any
^rtainty since the solipsist hypothesis remains always possible.
We are not limited to positing this nothingness in-itself as an
absolute fact; indeed it is not relative to our knowledge of
Other; rather it conditions our knowledge of the Other,
inerefore even if consciousnesses are only pure conceptual
collections of phenbmena, even if the rule of their existence
IS the percipere and the percipi, the fact still remains that the
tptutiplicity of these relational systems is a multiplicity in-
itself and that it immediately transforms them each one into a
*Tr. Correctioii for cttoxv ^
312 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
system in-itself. In addition, if I posit the notion that my
experience of the Other’s anger has as a correlate in another
system a subjective experience of anger, I reinstate the system
of the true image which Kant was especially concerned to get
rid of. To be sure, we are dealing with a relation of agreement
between the two phenomena — the anger perceived in the ges-
tures and signs and the anger apprehended as a phenome-
nal reality of inner sense — and not with a relation between a
phenomenon and a thing-in-itself. But the fact remains that
the criterion of truth here is the conformity of thought to its
object, not the agreement of representations with each other.
In fact precisely because all recourse to the noumenon is here
removed, the phenomenon of the anger felt is to that of the
anger established as the objective real is to- its image. The
problem is indeed one of adequate representation since there
is a real and a mode of apprehension of this real. If we were
dealing with the problem of my own anger, I could in fact
consider its subjective manifestations and its physiological ob-
jectively discernible manifestations as two series of the effects
of a single cause without having one of the series represent
the truth of the anger or its reality and the other only its effect
or its image. But if one of the series of the phenomena resides
in the Other and the other series in me, then the one series
functions as the reality of the other series, and the realist
scheme of truth is the only one which can be applied here.
Thus we abandoned the realist solution of the problem
only because it necessarily resulted in idealism; we deliberately
placed ourselves within the idealist perspective and thereby
gained nothing because, conversely, to the extent that
idealism rejects the solipsistic hypothesis, it results in a dog-
matic and totally unjustified realism. Let us' see if we can
understand this abrupt inversion of doctrines and if we can
derive from this paradox some information which will facil-
itate a correct position with respect to the question.
At ^e origin of the problem of the existence of others,
there is a fundamental 'presupposition: others are the Other,
that is &e self which is not myself. Therefore we grasp here
a negation as the constitutive structure of the being-of-others.
The presupposition common to both idealism and realism is
the constituting negation is an external negation. The
- is ^ot me and the one who I am not.
not indicates a nothingness as a given element of sep-
aration between the Other and myself. Between the Other and
313
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
myself there is a nothingness of separation. This nothing-
ness does not derive its origin from myself nor from the
Other, nor is it a reciprocal relation between, the Other and
myself. On the contrary, as a primary absence of relation, it
is originally the foundation of all relation between the Other .
and me. This is because the Other appears to me empirically^
on the occasion of the perception of a body, and this body is
an in-itself external to my body; the type of relation which
unites and separates these two bodies is a spatial relation, the
relation of things which have no relation among themselves,
pine exteriority in so far as it is given. The realist who be-
lieves that he apprehends the Other through his body con-
siders therefore that he is separated from the Other as one
body from another body, which means that the ontological
meaning of the negation contained in the judgment, “I am
not Paul,” is of the same type as that of the negation con-
tained in the judgment, “The table is not the chair.” Thus
since the separation of consciousnesses is attributable to the
bodies, there .is a sort of original space between diverse con-
sciousnesses; that is, precisely a given nothingness, an absolute
distance passively experienced. Idealism, to be sure, reduces
my body and the Other’s body to objective systems of repre-
sentation. For Schopenhauer my body is nothing but the “im-
mediate object,” But this view does not thereby suppress the
absolute distance between consciousnesses. A total system
of ' representations — i.e., each monad — can be limited only by
itself and so , can not enter into relation with what is not it
The knowing subject can neither limit another subject nor
cause itself to be limited by another subject. It is isolated by
its positive plenitude, and consequently tietween itself and
another equally isolated system there is preserved a spatial
separation as the very type of exteriority. Thus it is still space
which implicitly separates my consciousness from the Other’s.
Even so it must be added that the idealist without being
Ware of it is resorting to a “third man” in order to effect
the appearance of this external negation. For as we have seen,
every .external relation, inasmuch as it is not constituted by its
very terms, requires a witness to posit it. Thus for the idealist
^ for the realist one conclusion is imposed: due to the fact
that the Other is revealed to us in a spatial world, we are sep-
^ TV Other by a real or ideal space.
TTus presupposition entails a serious consequence: if my
relation to the Other must in fact be in the mode of indiffer-
314 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ent exteriority, then I can not in my being be affected by
either the upsurge or the abolition of the Other any more
than an In-itself can be affected by the apparition or the dis-
appearance of another In-itself. Consequently since the
Other can not act on my being by means of' his being, the
only way that he can reveal himself to me is by appearing as
an object to my knowledge. But it must be understood by
this that I must constitute the Other as the unification which
my spontaneity imposes upon a diversity of impressions; that
is, that I am the one who constitutes the Other in the field of
his experience. Therefore the Other can be for me only an
image in spite of the fact that the whole theory of knowledge
which I have erected aims at rejecting this notion of image.
Only a witness external both to myself and to the Other
could compare the image with the model and decide whether
it is a true one. Moreover this witness in order to be author-
ized could not in turn maintain ,a relation of exteriority with
both the Other and myself, for otherwise he would know us
only by images. Within the ekstatic unity of his being, he
would have to be simultaneously here upon me as the internal
negation of myself and over there upon the Other as the in~
ternal negation of the Other.
Thus the recourse to God, which we find in Leibniz, is
purely and simply a recourse to the negation of interiority;
it is concealed in the theological notion of creation: God at
the same time is and is not both myself and the Other since he
creates us. He must of necessity be myself in order to appre-
hend my reality without intermediary and with apodictic evi-
dence, and yet it is necessary that he not be me in order that
he may preserve his impartiality as witness and be able over
&ere both to be and not be the Other. The image of creation
is the most adequate here since in the creative act I look into
the very heart of what I create — ^for what I create is me — and
yet what I create opposes itself to me by closing in on itself in
an affirmation of objectivity. Thus the spatializing presupposi-
tion does not leave us any choice: it must either resort to God
or fall into a probabilism which leaves the door open to
solipsism.
But this conception of a God who is his creatures makes
us fall into a new dilemma: this is the difficulty presented by
the problem of substances in post-Cartesian thought. If .God
IS I and if he is the Other, then what guarantees my own
existence? If creation is held to be continuous, I remain al-
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
315
ways suspended between a distinct existence and a pantheistic
fusion with the Creator Being. If Creation is an original act
and if I am shut up against God, then nothing any longer
guarantees my existence to God; he is now united to me
only by a relation of exteriority, as the sculptor is related to
the finished statue, and once again he can know me only
through images. Under these conditions the notion of God,
while revealing to us the internal negation as the only possible
connection between consciousnesses, shows the concept’s total
inadequacy: God is neither necessary nor sufficient as a
guarantee of 'the Other’s existence. Fi^ermore God’s exis-
tence as the intermediary between me and the Other already
presupposes the presence of the Other to me in an intemd
connection; for God, being endowed with the essential quali-
ties of a Mind, appears as the quintessence of the Other, and
he must be able to maintain an internal connection with my-
self in order for a real foundation of the Other’s existence to
be valid for me. It seems therefore that a positive theory of the
Other’s existence must be able simultaneously to avoid solip-
sism and to dispense with a recourse to God if it envisages
my original relation to the Other as an internal negation; that
is, as a negation which posits the original distinction be-
tween the Other and myself as being such that it determines
me by means of the Other and determines the Other by
means of me. Is it possible to look at the question from th^
point of view?
ni. HUSSERL, HEGEL, HEIDEGGER
The philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
seems to have understood that once myself and the Other are
considered as two separate substances, we cannot escape sol-
ipsism; any union of these two substances must in fact be held
to be impossible. That is why the examination of modem theo-
ries reveals to us an attempt to seize at the very heart of the con-
^lousness a fundamental, transcending connection with the
Other which would be constitutive of each consciousness in
ife very upsurge. But while this philosophy appears to abandon
me postidate of the external negation, it nevertheless preserves
its essential consequence; that is, the aflarmation that my fun-
damental connection with the Other is realized through
Knovfledge,
316
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
When Husserl in his Cartesian Meditations and in Formal
and Transcendental Logic attempts to refute solipsism, he be-
lieves that he can succeed by showing that a referral to the
Other is the indispensable condition for the constitution of a
world. Without going into the details of his theory, wo shall
limit ourselves to indicating his general position. For Husserl
the world as it is revealed to consciousness is mter-monadic.
The Other is present in it not only as a particular concrete
and empirical appearance but as a permanent condition of
its unity and of its richness. Whether I consider this table
or this tree or this bare wall in solitude or with companions,
the Other is always there as a, layer of constitutive meanings
which belong to the very object which I consider; in short,
he is the veritable guarantee of the object’s objectivity. And
since our psycho-physical self is contemporary with the
world, forms a part of the world, and falls with the world
under the impact of the phenomenological reduction, the
Other appears as necessary to the very constitution of this ]
self. If I am to doubt the existence of my friend Pierre or of j
others in general, then inasmuch as this existence is on prin- j
ciple outside my experience I must of necessity doubt also my ^
concrete being, my empirical reality as a professor having
this or that tendency, these habits, this particular character.
There is no privilege for my self: my empirical Ego and
the Other’s empirical Ego appear in the world at the same
time. The general meaning of “Others” is necessary to the
constitution of each one of these “Egos.” Thus each object
far from being constituted as for Kant, by a simple relation
to the subject, appears in my concrete experience as poly-
valent; it is given originally as possessing systems of refer-
ence to an indefinite plurality of consciousnesses; it is on the
table, on the wall that the Other is revealed to me as that
to which the object under consideration is perpetually re-
ferred as well as on the occasion of the concrete appear-
ances of Pierre or Paul.
To be sure, these views show progress over the classical
jwsitions. It is undeniable that the instrumental-thing from
the moment of its discovery refers to a plurality of For-itselfs.
We shall have to return to this point It is also certain that
the meaning of “the Other” can not come from the ex-
perience nor from a reasoning by analogy effected on the
occasion of the experience; on the contrary, it is in the
ig of the concept of the Other that the experience is in-
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
317
terpreted. Does that mean that the concept of the Other is a
priori? This we shall attempt to determine later. But in spite
of these undeniable advantages Husserl’s theory does not seem
to us perceptibly different from Kant’s. This is due to the
fact that while my empirical Ego is not any more sure than
the Other’s, Husserl has retained the transcendental subject,
which is radically distinct from the Ego and which strongly
resembles the Kantian subject. Now what ought to be dem-
onstrated is that it is not the parallelism of the empirical
“Egos”- which throws doubt on the person but that of the tran-
scendental subjects. This is because actually the Other is
never that empirical person who is encountered in my experi-
ence; he is the transcendental subject to whom this person by
nature refers. Thus the true problem is that of the connection
of transcendental subjects who are beyond experience. If
someone replies that from the start the transcendental subject
refers to other subjects for the constitution of the noematic
whole, it is easy to reply that it refers to them as to meanings.
The Other here would be a kind of supplementary category
which would allow a world to be constituted, not a real being
existing beyond this world. Of course the “category” of the
Othgf implies in its very meaning a reference from the other
side of the world to a subject, but this reference could be only
hypothetical. It has the pure value of the content of a unify-
mg concept; it is valid in and for the world. Its laws are
limited to the world, and the Other is by nature outside the
world. Furthermore Husserl has removed the very possibility
of understanding what can be meant by the extra-mundane
being of the Other since he defines being as the simple indi-
cation of an infinite series of operations to be effected.
There could be no better way to measure being by knowledge.
Now even admitting that knowledge in general measures
being, the Other’s being is measured in its reality by the
knowledge which the Other h^ of himself, not by that which
I have of him. What I must attain is the Other, not as I ob-
tam knowledge of him, but as he obtains knowledge of him-
self — ^which is impossible. This would in fact suppose the in-
ternal identification of myself with the Other. Thus we find
here again that distinction on principle between the Other
and myself which does not stem from the exteriority of our
oodles but from the simple fact that each of us exists in in-
wiority and that a knowledge valid for interiority can be
eiiected only in interiority which on principle excludes all
318 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
knowledge of the Other as he knows himself — i.e., as he is.
Moreover Husserl understood this since he says that “the
Other” as he is revealed to our concrete experience is an ,
absence. But within Husserl’s philosophy, at least, how can
one have a full intuition of an absence? Tlie Other is the ob-
ject of empty intentions, the Other on principle refuses him-
self to us and flees. The only reality which remains is there-
fore that of my intention; the O^er is the empty noema
which corresponds to my directing toward the Other, to the
extent that he appears concretely in my experience. He is an
ensemble of operations of unification and of the constitution
of my experience so that he appears as a transcendental con-
cept. Husserl replies to the solipsist that the Other’s existence
is as sure as that of the world, and Husserl includes in the
world my psycho-physical existence. But the solipsist says the
same thing: it is as sure, he will say, but no more sure. The
existence of the world is measured, he will add, by the knowl-
edge which I have of it; the case will not be otherwise for
the existence of the Other.
Formerly I believed that I could escape solipsism by re-
futing Husserl’s concept of the existence of the Transcenden-
tal “Ego.”^ At that time I thought that since I had emptied
my consciousness of its subject, nothing remained there
which was privileged as compared to the Other. But actually
although I am still persuaded that the hypothesis of a tran-
scendental subject is useless and disastrous, abandoning it
does not help one bit to solve the question of the ejdstence
of Others. Even if outside the empirical Ego there is nothing
other than the consciousness of that Ego — ^that is, a tran-
scendental field without a subject — the fact remains that my
affirmation of the Other demands and requires the existence
beyond the world of a similar transcendental field. Conse-
quently the only way to escape solipsism would be here again
to prove that my transcendental consciousness is, in its very
bemg, affected by the extra-mundane existence of other con-
sciousnesses of the same type. Because Husserl has reduced
being to a series of meanings, the only connection which
^ has been able to establish between my being and that of the
Other is a connection of knowledge. Therefore Husserl can
not escape solipsism any more than Kant could.
If now instead of observing the rules of chronological
succession, we are guided by those of a sort of non-tern- '
* “La transcendance de I’ego.” 1937.
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
319
poral dialectic, we shall find that in the solution which
Hegel gives to the problem in the first volume of The Phe-
nomenology of Mind, he has made significant progress over
Husserl. Here the appearance of the Other is indispensable
not to the constitution of the world and of my empirical
“Ego” but to the very existence of my consciousness as self-
consciousness. In fact as self-consciousness, the Self itself
apprehends itself. The equation “Myself = Myself” or “I am
I” is precisely the expression of this fact. At first this self-
consciousness is pure self-identity, pure existence for itself. It
has certitude of itself, but this certitude still lacks truth. In
fact this certitude would be true only to the extent that its
own existence for itself appeared to it as an independent ob-
ject. Thus self-consciousness is first a syncretic relation
without truth between a subject and an object, an object
which is not yet objectified and which is this subject him-
self. Since the impulse of this consciousness is to realize its
concept by becoming conscious of itself in all respects, it
tends to make itself valid externally by giving itself objectiv-
ity and manifest existence. It is concerned with making the
“I am I” explicit and producing itself as an object in order to
attain the ultimate stage of development. This state in an-
other sense is naturally the prime mover for the becoming of
consciousness; it is self-consciousness in general, which is rec-
ognized in other self-consciousnesses and which is identical
Mth them and with itself. The mediator is the Other. The
Other appears along with myself since self-consciousness is
identical with itself by means of the exclusion of every
Other. Thus the primary fact is the plurality of conscious-
nesses, and this plurality is realized in the form of a double,
reciprocal relation of exclusion. Here we are then in the pres-
ence of that connection by means of an internal negation
which was demanded earlier. No external nothingness in-
itself separates my consciousness from the Other’s conscious-
ness; it is by the very fact of being me that I exclude the
Other is the one who excludes me by being him-
self, the one whom I exclude by being myself. Consciousnesses
are directly supported by one another in a reciprocal imbrica-
tion of their being.
position allows us at the same time to define the
^ which the Other appears to me: he is the one who is
° therefore he is given as a non-essential object
With a character of negativity. But this Other is also a self-
320 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
consciousness. As such he appears to me as an ordinary object
immersed in the being of life. Similarly it is thus that I appear
to the Other: as a concrete, sensible, immediate existence.
Here Hegel takes his stand on the ground not of a univocal
relation which goes from me (apprehended by the cogito)
to the Other, but of the reciprocd relation which he defines
as “the self-apprehension of the one in the other.” In fact it
is only in so far as each man is opposed to the Other that he
is absolutely for himself. Opposite the Other and confronting
the Other, each one asserts his right of being individual. Thus
the cogito itself can not be a point of departure for philoso-
phy; in fact it can be born only in consequence of my appear-
ance for myself as an individual, and this appearance is con-
ditioned by the recognition of the Other. The problem of the
Other should not be posited in terms of the cogito; on the
contrary, the existence of the Other renders the cogito possible
as the abstract moment when the self is apprehended as an
object. Thus the “moment” which Hegel calls being for the
Other is a necessary stage of the development of self-con-
sciousness; the road of interiority passes through the Other.
But the Other is of interest to me only to the extent that he
is another Me, a Me-object for Me, and conversely to the
extent that he reflects my Me— /.c., is, in so far as I am an
object for him. Due to the fact that I must necessarily be
an object for myself only over there in the Other, I must ob-
tain from the Other recognition of my being. But if another
consciousness must mediate between my consciousness for
itself and itself, then the being-fdr-itself of my conscious-
ness — and consequently its being ■ in general — depends on
the Other. As I appear to the Other, so I am. Moreover
since the Other is such as he appears to me and since my
being depends upon the Other, the way in which I appear — •
that is, the moment of the development of my self-conscious-
ness — depends on the way in which the Other appears to me.
The value of the Other’s recognition of me depends on the
value of my recognition of the Other. In this sense to the
extent that the Other apprehends me as bound to a body
and immersed in life, I am myself only an Other. In order to
make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life.
To risk one’s life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to
the objective form or to any determined existence — as not-
bound to life.
But at the same time I pursue the death of the Other.
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
321
This means that I wish to cause myself to be mediated by an
Other who is only other — ^that is, by a dependent conscious-
ness whose essential characteristic is to exist only for another.
This will be accomplished at the very moment when I risk my
life, for in the struggle against the other I have made an
abstraction of my sensible being by risking it. On the other
hand, the Other prefers life and freedom even while showing
that he has not been able to posit himself as not-bound to the
objective form. Therefore he remains bound to external things
in general; he appears to me and he appears to himself as
non-essential. He is the Slave, I am the Master; for him it is
I who am essence. Thus there appears the famous “Master-
Slave” relation which so profoundly influenced Marx. We
need not here enter into its details. It is sufficient to observe
that the Slave is the Truth of the Master. But this unilateral
recognition is unequal and insufficient, for the truth of his
self-certitude for the Master is a non-essential consciousness;
therefore the Master is not certain of being for himself as
truth. In order to attain this truth there is necessary “a mo- -
ment in which the master does for himself what he does as
regards the Other and when the slave does as regards the
Other what he does for himself.”® At this moment there will
appear a self-consciousness in general which is recognized in
other self-consciousnesses and which is identical with them
and with itself.
Thus Hegel’s brilliant intuition is to make me depend on
the Other in my being. I am, he said, a being for-itself which
is for-itself only through another. Therefore the Other pene-
trates me to the heart. I can not doubt him without doubting
myself since “self-consciousness is real only in so far as it
recognizes its echo (and its reflection) in another.”® Since the
very doubt implies a consciousness which exists for itself, the
Other’s existence conditions my attempt to doubt it just as in
the work of Descartes my existence conditions systematic
doubt. Thus solipsism seems to be put out of the picture
once and for all. By proceeding from Husserl to Hegel, we
have realized immense progress: first the negation which
constitutes the Other is direct, internal, and reciprocal;
second, it calls each consciousness to account and pierces
to the deepest part of its being; the problem is posited
on the level of inner being, of the universal and tran-
® Ph6nominologle de VEsprlt, p. 148. Edition Cosson.
^ Propedeutik, p. 20, first edition of the complete works.
322 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
scendental “I”; finally in my essential being I depend on
the essential being of the Other, and instead of holding that
my being-for-myself is opposed to my being-for-others, I find
that being-for-others appears as a necessary condition for my
being-for-myself.
Yet in spite of the wide scope of this solution, in spite of
the richness and profundity of the detailed insights with
which the theory of the Master and the Slave is filled to over-
flowing, can we be satisfied with it?
To be sure, Hegel has posed the question of the being of
consciousnesses. It is being-for-itself ^d being-for-others
which he is studying, and he holds that each conscious-
ness includes the reality of the other. Nevertheless it is
certain that this ontological problem remains everywhere for-
mulated in terms of knov/ledge. The mainspring of the con-
flict of consciousnesses is the effort of each one to transform
his self-certitude into truth. And we know that this truth can
be attained only in so far as my consciousness becomes an o6-
ject for the Other at the same time as the Other becomes an
object for my consciousness. Thus when idealism asks, “How
can the Other be an object for me?” Hegel while remaining
on the same ground as idealism replies; if there is in truth a
Me for whom the Other is an object, this is because there is
an Other for whom the Me is object Knowledge here is still
the measure of being, and Hegel does not even conceive of
the possibility of a being-for-others which is not finally re-
ducible to a “being-as-object.” Thus a universal self-con-
sciousness which seeks to disengage itself through all these
dialectical phases is by its own admission reducible to a purely
empty formula— the "I am I.” Yet Hegel writes, “This prop-
osition regarding self-consciousness is void of ^1 content”^
And in another place he says, “fit is] the process of absolute
abstraction which consists in surpassing all immediate existence
and which results in the purely negative being of consciousness
identical with itself.” The limiting term of this dialecti-
cal conflict, universal self-consciousness, is not enriched in
the midst of its avatars; it is on the contrary entirely de-
nuded. It is no more than the “I know that another knows
me as me.” Of course this is because for idealism absolute-'
knowledge are" identical. But what does this
Identification involve?
To begin with, this “I am I,” a pure, universal form of
’’ Propedeuilk, p. 20.
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
323
identity, has nothing in common with the concrete conscious-
ness which we have attempted to describe in our Introduction.
There we established that the being of self-consciousness
could not be defined in terms of knowledge. Knowledge be-
gins with reflection (reflexion) but the game of “refiection
(re/?eO -reflecting” is not a subject-object dyad, not even im-
plicitly. Its being does not depend on any transcendent con-
sciousness; rather its mode of being is precisely to be in ques-
tion for itself. We showed subsequently in the first chapter of
Part Two that the relation of the reflection to the reflecting
was in no way a relation of identity and could not be reduced
to the “Me = Me” or to the “I am I” of Hegel. The reflection
does not make itself be the reflecting; we are dealing here with
a being which nihilates itself in its being and which seeks in
vain to dissolve into itself as a self. If it is true that this de-
scription is the only one which allows us to understand the
original fact of consciousness, then we must judge that Hegel
has not succeeded in accounting for this abstract doubling of
the Me which he gives as equivalent to self-consciousness.
Finally we succeeded in getting rid of the pure unreflective
consciousness of the transcendental “I” which obscured it
and we showed that selfness, the foundation of personal exis-
tence, was altogether different from an Ego or from a refer-
ence of the Ego to itself. There /can be, therefore, no
question of defining consciousness in terms of a transcen-
dental ego-ology. In short, consciousness is a concrete being
sui generis, not an abstract, unjustifiable relation of identity.
It is selfness and not the seat of an opaque, useless Ego. Its
being is capable of being reached by a transcendental reflec-
tion, and there is a truth of consciousness which does not
depend on the Other; rather the very being of consciousness,
since it is independent of knowledge, pre-exists its truth. On
this plane as for naive realism, being measures truth; for the
truth of a reflective intuition is measured by its conformity to
being: consciousness was there before it was known. There-
fore if consciousness is affirmed in the face of the Other, it is
because it lays claim to a recognition of its being and not of
an abstract truth. In fact it would be ill conceived to think
that the ardent and perilous conflict between master and
slave had for its sole stake the recognition of a formula as
barren and abstract as the "I am I.” Moreover there would
be a deception in this very conflict since the end finally at-
tained would be universal self-consciousness, “the intuition
324
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
of the existing self by the self.” Here as everywhere we ought
to oppose to Hegel Kierkegaard, who represents the claims
of the individual as such. The individual claims his achieve-
ment as an individual, the recognition of his concrete being,
and of the objective specification of a universal structure. Of
course the rights which I demand from the Other posit the
universality of self; respect of persons demands the recog-
nition of my person as imiversal. But it is my concrete
and individual being which flows into this universal and fills
it; it is for that being-there that I demand rights. The particu-
lar is here the support and foundation of the universal; the
universal in this case could have no meaning if it did not
exist for the purpose of the individual.
This identification of bemg and knowledge results in a large
number of errors or impossibilities. We shall consider them
here under two headings; that is, we shall marshal agamst
Hegel a twofold charge of optimism.
In the first place Hegel appears to us to be guilty of an
epistemological optimism. It seems to him that the truth of
self-consciousness can appear; that is, that an objective agree-
ment can be realized between consciousnesses — ^by authority
of the Other’s recognition of me and my recognition of the
Other. This recognition can be simultaneous and reciprocal;
“I know that the Other knows me as himself.” It produces
actually and in truth the universality of self-consciousness. But '
the correct statement of the problem of Others renders this
passage to the umversal impossible. If the Other can in fact
refer my ‘‘self” to me, then at least at the end of the dialecti-
cal evolution there must be a common measure between what
I am for him, what he is for me, what I am for myself, what
he is. for himself. Of course this homogeneity does not exist
at the start; Hegel agrees to this. The relation “Master-Slave”
is not reciprocal. But Hegel affirms that the reciprocity must
be capable of being establidied. Here at the outset he is creat-
mg a confusion — so easy that it seems voluntary — ^between
being-an-object and 7j/e,.The Other, he says, appears to me as
^ object. Now the object is Myself in the Other. When
Hegel wants to define object-state more exactly, he dis-
tmgmshes in it three elements: “This self-apprehension by
one m tlw other is: (1) The abstract moment of self-identity.
(2) Each one, however, has also this particularity, that he
manifests himself to the Other as an external object, as an
immediately concrete and sensible existence. (3) Each one is
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS 325
absolutely for himself and individual as opposed to the
other.”®
We see that the abstract moment of self-identity is given
in the knowledge of the Other. It is given with two other
moments of the total structure. But — a curious thing in a
philosopher of Synthesis — Hegel did not ask if these three el^
ments did not react on one another in such a way as to consti-
tute a new form resistant to analysis. He defines his point of
view in the Phenomenology of Mind when he declares that
the Other appears first as non-essential (this is the sense of the
third moment cited above) and as a “consciousness immersed
in the being of life.” But here we are dealing with a pure co-
existence of the abstract moment and of life. It is sufficient
therefore that I or the Other risk our life in order that in the
very act of offering oneself to danger, we realize the analytical
separation of life and consciousness: “What the Other is for
each consciousness, each consciousness is for the Other; each
consciousness in turn accomplishes in itself by mejans of its
own activity and by means of the activity of the Other, that
pure abstraction of being for itself. ... To present oneself
as a pure abstraction of self-consciousness is to reveal oneself
as a pure negation of one’s objective form, to reveal oneself as
not-bound to any determined existence; ... it is to reveal
oneself as not-bound to life.”® Of course Hegel will say later
that by the experience of risk and of the danger of death,
self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as pure
self-consciousness; but this is from a totally different point
of view, and the fact still remains that I can always separate,
m the Other, the pure truth of self-consciousness from his
life. Thus the slave apprehends the self-consciousness of the
paster; he is its truth although, as we have seen, this truth
is still not adequate.’^®
But is it the same thing to say that the Other on
principle appears to me as an object and to say that he appears
to me as bound to a particidar existence, as immersed in life?
If we remain on the level of pure, logical hypotheses, we shall
note ffist that the Other can in fact be given to a conscious-
ness in the form of an object without that object’s being
precisely bound to that contingent object which we call a
living body. In fact our experience presents us only with con-
® Propedeutik, p. 18 .
'‘Phinomdnologie de I’Esprit, p. 148.
Ph6nomSnologie de VEsprlt. p. 148.
326
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
scious, living individuals, but in theory it must be remarked
that the Other is an object for me because he is the Other and
not because he appears on the occasion of a body-object;
otherwise we should fall back into the illusion of space which
we discussed above. Thus what is essential to the Other qua
Other is objectivity and not life. Moreover Hegel took ftis
logical aflBrmation as his point of departure.
But if it is true that the connection between a conscious-
ness and life does not distort the nature of the “abstract mo-
ment of self-consciousness” which remains there, immersed,
always capable of being discovered, is the case the same for
objectivity? In other words, since we know that a conscious-
ness is before being known, then is not a known consciousness
wholly modified by the very fact that it is known? Is
“to appear as an object for a consciousness” still “to be con-
sciousness"? It is easy to reply to this question: the very
being of self-consciousness is such that in its being, its being
is in question; this means that it is pure interiority. It is per-
petually a reference to a self which it has to be. Its being is
defined by this: that it is tMs being in the mode of being
what it is not and of not being what it is. Its bemg, there-
fore, is the radical exclusion of ail objectivity. I am the one
who can not be an object for myself, the one who can not
even conceive for myself of existence in the form of an ob-
ject (save on the- plane of the reflective dissociation — ^but we
have seen that reflection is the drama of the being who can
not be an object for himself) . This is not because of the lack
of detachment or because of an intellectual prejudice or of a
limit imposed on my knowledge, but because objectivity de-
mands an explicit negation: the object is what I make myself
not-be whereas I myself am what I make myself be. I pursue
myself everywhere, I can not escape myself, I reapprehend
myself from behind. Even if I could attempt to make myself
an object, I would already be myself at the heart of that ob-
ject which I am; and at the very center of that object I
should have to be the subject who is looking at it, More-
wer &is is what Hegel hinted at when he said that the
Other s existence is necessary in order for me to be an object
for myself. But by holding that self-consciousness is ex-
pressed by the “I am I" — f.e., by identifying it with self-
knowledge — ^he failed to derive the consequences of his first
^rmations; for he introduced into consciousness something
like an object existing potentially to be disengaged with-
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
327
out change by the Other. But if to be an object is precisely
not-to-be-me, then the fact of being an object for a con-
sciousness radically modifies consciousness not in what it
is for itself but in its appearance to the Other. The Other’s
consciousness is what I can simply contemplate and what
because of this fact appears to me as being a pure given
instead of being what has to be me. It is what is released to
me in universal time (i.e., in the original dispersion of mo-
ments) instead of appearing to me within the unity of its
own temporalization. For the only consciousness which
can appear to me in its own tempordization is mine, and it
can do so only by renouncing all objectivity. In short the
for-itself as for-itself can not be known by the Other. The
object which_ I apprehend under the name of the Other
appears to me in a radically other form. The Other is not a
for-itself as he appears to me; I do not appear to myself as I
am for-the-Other. I am incapable of apprehending for myself
the self which I am for the Other, just as I am incapable of
apprehending on the basis of the Other-as-object which ap-
pears to me, what the Other is for himself. How then could
we establish a universal concept subsuming under the name
of self-consciousness, my consciousness for myself and (of)
myself and my knowledge of the Other? But this is not all.
According to Hegel the Other is an object, and I appre-
hend myself as an oSject in the Other. But one of these
afiBrmations destroys the other. In order for me to be able to
appear to myself as an object in the Other, I would have to
apprehend the Other as subject; that is, to apprehend him in
his interiority. But m so far as the Other appears to me as
object, my objectivity for him can not appear to me. Of course
I apprehend that the Other-as-object refers to me by means
of intentions and acts, but due to the very fact that he is an
object, the Other-as-a-mirror is clouded and no longer reflects
an5rthing. These intentions and these acts are thin gs in the
world and are apprehended m the Time of the World;
^ey are established and contemplated, their meaning is an ob-
ject for me. Thus I can only appear to myself as a transcen-
dent quality to which the Other’s acts and intentions refer;
but smce die Other’s objectivity destroys my objectivity for
bim, it is as an internal subject that I apprehend myself as
being that to which those intentions and those acts refer. It ,
understood that this apprehension of myself by my-
self is in pure terms of consciousness, not of knowledge; by
328 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
having to be what I am in form of an ekstatic self-conscious-
ness, I apprehend the Other as an object pointing to me. Thus
Hegel’s optimism results in failure: between the Other-as-ob-
ject and Me-as-subject there is no common measure, no
more than between self-consciousness and consciousness of
the Other, I can not know 'myself in the Other if the Other
is first an object for me; neither can I apprehend the Other in
his true being — that is, in his subjectivity. No universal
knowledge can be derived from the relation of conscious-
nesses. This is what we shall call their ontological separation.
But there is in Hegel another and more fundamental form
of optimism. This may be called an ontological optimism. For
Hegel indeed truth is truth of the Whole. And he places him-
self at the vantage point of truth — Le., of the Whole — ^to con-
sider the problem of the Other. Thus when Hegelian monism
considers the relation of consciousness, it does not put it-
self in any particular consciousness. Although the Whole is
to be realized, it is already there as the truth of all which is ■
true. Thus when Hegel writes that every consciousness, since
it is identical with itself, is other than the Other, he has es-
tablished himself in the whole, outside consciousnesses, and
he considers them from the point of view of the Absolute.
For individual consciousnesses are moments in the whole,
moments which by themselves are Unselbstandig, and the
whole is a mediator between consciousnesses. Hence is de-
rived an ontological optimism parallel to the epistemological
optunism: plurality can and must be surpassed toward
the totality. But if Hegel can assert the reality of this sur-
passing, it is because he has already given it to bhnself
at the outset In fact he has forgotten his own consciousness;
he is the Whole, and consequently if he so easily resolves
the problem of p^icidar consciousnesses it is because for
him there never has been any real problem in this connection.
Actually he does not raise the question of the relation be-
tween his own consciousness and that of the Other. By
effecting completely the abstraction of his own, he studies
purely and simply the relation between the consciousnesses
of others i.e., the relation of consciousnesses which are
already for him objects whose nature, according to him, is
precisely that of being a particular type of object — the sub-
ject-object. These consciousnesses from the totalitarian point
of view which he has adopted are strictly equivalent to each
THE EXISTENCE. OF OTHERS 329
other although each of them is separated from the rest by a
particular privilege.-
But if Hegel has forgotten himself, we can not forget
Hegel. This means that we are referred back to the cogito. In
fact, if, as we have established, the being of my conscious-
ness is strictly irreducible to knowledge, then I can not tran-
scend my being toward a reciprocal and universal relation in
which I could see my being and that of others as equivalent
On the contrary, I must establish myself in my being and posit
the problem of the Other in terms of my being. In a word the
sole point of departure is the interiority of the cogito. We
must understand by this that each one must be able by starting
out from his own interiority, to rediscover the Other’s being as
a transcendence which conditions the very being of that in-
teriority. This of necessity implies that the multiplicity of
consciousnesses is on principle unsurpassable, for I can un-
doubtedly transcend myself toward a Whole, but I can not
establish myself in this Whole so as to contemplate myself and
to contemplate the Other. No logical or epistemological op-
timism can cover the scandal of the plurality of conscious-
nesses. If Hegel believed that it coidd, this is because he "
never grasped the nature of that particular dimension of
being which is self-consciousness. The task which an on-
tology can lay down for itself is to describe this scandal
and to found it in the very nature of being, but ontology
is powerless to overcome it. It is possible — as we shall see
better later — ^that we may be able to refute solipsism and
show that the Other’s existence is both evident and cer-
tain for us. But even if we could succeed in making the
Other’s existence share in the apodictic certainty of the
cogito — i.e., of my own existence — we should not thereby
“surpass” the Other toward any inter-monad totality. So long
as consciousnesses exist, the separation and conflict of con-
sciousness will remain; we shall simply have discovered their
foundation and their true terrain.
What has this long criticism accomplished for us?
Simply this: if we are to refute solipsism, then my relation to
the Other is first and fundamentally a relation of being to
being, not of knowledge to knowledge. We have seen Hus-
serl’s failure when on this particular level he measures being
by knowledge, and Hegel’s when he identifies knowledge
and being. But we have equally recognized that Hegel, al-
tnough his vision is obscured by the postulate of absolute
330 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
idealism, has been able to put the discussion on its true plane.
In Sein und Zeit Heidegger seems to have profited by
study of his predecessors and to have been deeply impressed
with this twofold necessity: (1) the relation between “hu-
man-realities” must be a relation of being; (2) this relation
must cause “human-realities” to depend on one another in
their essential being. At least his theory fulfills these two re-
quirementsi In his abrupt, rather barbaric fashion of cutting
Gordian knots rather than trying to untie them, he gives in
answer to the question posited a pure and simple definition.
He has discovered several moments — ^inseparable except by
abstraction — ^in “being-in-the-world,” which characterizes
human reality. These moments are “world,” “being-in,” and
“being.” He has described the world as “that by which hu-
man reality makes known to itself what it is”; “being-in” he
has defined as Befindlichkeit and Verstand.^^ We have still to
speak of being; that is, the mode in which human reality is its
being-in-the-world. This, Heidegger teUs us, is the mit-Sein
— ^that is, “being-with.” Thus the characteristic of being of
human-reality is its being with others. This does not
come about by chance. I do not exist first in order that
subsequently a contingency should make me encounter the
Other. The question here is of an essential structure of my
being. But this structure is not established from outside and
from a totalitarian point of view as it was with Hegel. To
be sure, Heidegger does not take his departure from the cogito
in the Cartesian sense of the discovery of consciousness by
itself; but the human-reality which is revealed to him and for
which he seeks to fix the structures in concepts is his own.
“Dasein ist je meines” he writes. It is by making explicit
the pre-ontological comprehension which I have of myself that
I apprehend being-with-others as an essential characteristic of
my being. In short I discover the transcendental relation to
the Other as constituting my own being, just as I have dis-
covered that being-in-the-wofld measures my human-reality.
Henceforth the problem of the Other is a false problem. The
Other is no longer first a particular existence which I encoun-
ter in the world — and which could not be indispensable to my
own existence since I existed before encountering it. The
Other is the ex-centric limit which contributes to the con-
^-oughly, Befindlichkeit is “finitude” and Verstand “comprehension.”
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
331
stitution of my being. He is the test of my being inasmuch
as he throws me outside of myself toward structures which
at once both escape me and define me; it is this test which
originally reveals the Other to me.
Let us observe in addition that the type of connection
with the Other has changed. With realism, idealism, Husserl,
Hegel, the type of relation between consciousnesses was being-
for; the Other appeared to me and even constituted me
in so far as he was for me or I was for him. The problem was
the mutual recognition of consciousnesses brought face to
face which appeared in the world and which confronted each
other. “To-be-with” has an altogether different meaning;
“with” does not intend the reciprocal relation of recognition
and of conflict which would result from the appearance of a
human-reality other than mine in the midst of the world. It
expresses rather a sort of ontological solidarity for the exploita-
tion of this world. The Other k not origin^ly bound to me
as an ontic reality appearing in the midst of the world among
“instruments” as a type of particular object; in that case he
would be already degraded, and the relation uniting him to me
could never take on reciprocity. The Other is not an object.
In his connection with me he remains a human-reality;
the being by which he determines me in my being is his pure
-being apprehended as “being-in-the-world.” And we know
that the “in” must be understood in the sense of colo, habito,
not of insum; to-be-in-the-world is to haunt the world, not to
be ensnared in it; and it is in my “being-in-the-world” that
the Other determines me. Our relation is not a frontal opposi-
tion but rather an oblique interdependence. In so far as I make
a world exist as a complex of instruments which I use for the
ends of my human reality, I cause myself to be determined in
my being by a being who makes the world exist as a complex
of instruments for the ends of his reality. Moreover it is not
necessary to understand this being-with as a pure con-
comitance which is passively received by my being. For Hei-
<^®gger, to be is to be one’s own possibilities; that is, to
make oneself be. It is then a mode of being which I make
myself be. And it is very true that I am responsible for my
bemg-for the Other in so far as I realize him freely in authen-
ticity or in unauthenticity. It is in complete freedom and by an
wigmal choice that, for example, I realize my being-wilh in
me anonymous form of “they.” And if I am asked how my
being-with” can exist for-myself, I must reply that through
332 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the world I make known to myself what I am. In particul^
when I am in the unauthentic mode of the “they,’ the world
refers to me a sort of impersonal reflection of my nnauthen-
tic possibilities in the form of instruments and complexes of
instruments which belong to “everybody” and which belong
to me so far as I am “everybody”! ready-made clothes,
common means of transportation, parks, gardens, public
places, shelters made for anyone who may take shelter there,
etc. lims I make myself known as anybody by means of the
indicative complex of instruments which in(hcate me as a
Worumwillen. The unauthentic state — which is my ordinary
state in so far as I have not realized my conversion to authen-
ticity — ^reveals to me my “being-with,” not as the relation of
one unique personality with other personalities equally umque,
not as the mutual connection of “most irreplaceable bein^,” -
but as a total interchangeability of the terms of the relation.
The determination of the terms is still lacking; I am not
opposed to the Other, for I am not “me”; instead we have
the social unity of the they. To posit the problem on the level
of the incommunicability of individual subject was to com-
mit an Oorapov irpdTspov,^ to stand the world on its head.
Authenticity and individuality have to be earned: I shall be
my own authenticity only if under the influence of the call of
conscience {Ruf des Gewissens) I launch out toward death
with a resolute-decision {Entschlossenheit) as toward my own
most peculiar possibility. At this moment I reveal myself to
myself in authenticity, and I raise others along with myself
toward the authentic.
The empirical image which may best symbolize Heideg-
ger’s intuition is not that of a conflict but rather a crew. The
original relation of the Other and my consciousness not
the you and me; it is the we. Heidegger’s being-with is not
the clear and distinct position of an individual confronting
another individual; it is not knowledge. It is the mute exis-
tence in common of one member of the crew with his fellows,
that existence which the rhythm of the oars or the regular
movements of the coxswain will render sensible to the rowers
and which will be made manifest to them by the common goal
to be attained, the boat or the yacht to be overtaken, and the
entire world (spectators, performance, etc.) which is profiled
on the horizon. It is on the common ground of this co-exis-
tence that the abrupt revelation of my “being-unto-death”
^^Tr. Correction for iartiQov nc6t7)Qov, obviously a misprint.
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
333
will suddenly make me stand out in an absolute “common soli-
tude” while at the same time it raises the others to that soli-
tude.
This time we have indeed been given what we asked for:
a being which in its own being implies the Other’s being. And
yet we can not consider ourselves satisfied. First of all, Hei-
degger’s theory offers us the indication of the solution to be
found rather than that solution itself. Even if we should with-
out reservation accept his substitution of “being-with” for
“being-for,” it would still remain for us a simple affirmation
without foundation. Undoubtedly we shall encounter certain
empirical states of our being — ^in particular that to which the
Germans give the untranslatable name Stimmung ^^ — ^which
seem to reveal a co-existence of consciousnesses rather than a
relation of opposition. But it is precisely - this co-existence
which must be explained. Why does it become the unique
foundation of our being? Why is it the fundamental type of
our relation with others? Why did Heidegger believe that he
was authorized to pass from tMs empirical and ontic establish-
ment of being-with to a position claiming co-existence as the
ontological structure of my “being-in-the-world”? And what
type of being does this co-existence have? To what extent is
the negation which, makes the Other an other and which con-
stitutes him as non-essential maintained? If we suppress it
entirely, are we not going to fall into a monism? And if we
are to preserve it as an essential structure of the relation to
the Other, then what modification must it undergo in order
to lose the character of opposition which it had in being-for-
others and acquire this character as a connection which creates
solidarity and which is the very structure of being-with? And
how shall we be able to pass from there to the concrete ex-
perience of the Other in the world, as when from my window
I see a man walking in the street? To be smre it is tempting to
conceive of myself as standing out on the undifferentiated
^ound of the human by means of the impulse of my freedom,
by the choice of my unique possibilities — and perhaps this
conception holds an important element of truth. But in this
torm at least such a view gives rise to serious objections.
First of all, the ontological point of view joins here with
me abstract view of the Kantian subject. To say that human
. Literally “pitch” or “tuning.” Perhaps the nearest English equivalent
IS sympathy” in its original Greek sense of feeling or experiencing with
someone.
334
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
reality (even if it is my human reality) “is-with*’ by means of
its ontological structure is to say that it is-with by nature —
that is, in an essential and universal capacity. Even if this
affirmation were proved, it would not enable us to explain any
concrete bcing-with. In otiicr words, the ontological co-cxis-
tence which appears as the structure of “heing-in-thc-world”
can in no way serve ns a foundation to an ontic being-witb,
such as, for example, the co-cxislcncc whicli appears in my
friendship with Pierre or in the couple which Annie and I
make. In fact it would he neccs<.ary to .show that “heine-
with-Pierre” or "bcing-wiih-Annic” Is a structure constitu-
tive of my concrete-being. But this is impossible from the
point of view which Heidegger has adopted. The Other in
the relation "with,” taken on tltc ontological level, can not in
fact be concretely determined any more than llic directly
confronted human-reality of which it is the alter ego; it is
an abstract term and hence Utnclh^iUndif’, and it does not
wntain the power of becoming that Othcr—Pierre or Annie.
Thus the relation of the mit-Sein can be of absolutely no u.sc
to us in resolving the psychological, concrete problem of the
recognition of the Other. There arc two incommunicable
levels and tsvo problems which demand separate solutions.
difficulties
which Heidegger encounters in passing in general from the
ontological level to the ontic level, in passing from “being-in-
e-worid in general to my relation with this particular in-
s rument, in passing from my heing-iinto-dcath, svhich makes
ot my death my most essentia! possibility, to this “ontic”
ea h >yhich I shall experience by encountering this or that
X erna existent. But this difficulty can be disguised, if need
e, in all other eases since, for example, it is human reality
Which causes the existence of a world in which a threat of
death to human reality is hidden. Better yet, if the world
fu f because it is “mortal” in the sense in which we say
a a wound IS mortal. But the impossibility of passing from
other bursts forth when we meet the problem
ckstatic upsurge of its
ing-in- e-world, human reality makes a world exist, one
n not, for all that, say that its bcing-with causes another
to rise up. Of course I am the being by whom
hp?no But are we to say that I am the
there is” another human-reality? If we un-
y that that I am the being for whom there is for me
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
335
another human reality, this is a pure and simple truism. If we
mean that I am the being by whom there are in general
Others, we fall back into solipsism. In fact this human reality
“with whom” I am is itself “in-the-world-with-me”; it is the
free foundation of a world. (How does this make it my
world? We can not deduce from the being-with an identity
of the worlds “in which” the human realities are.) Human
reality is its own possibilities. It is then for itself without
having to wait for me to make its being exist in the form of
the “there is.” Thus I can constitute a world as “mortal,” but
I can not constitute a human-reality as a concrete being
which is its own possibilities. My being-with, apprehended
from the standpoint of “my” being, can be considered only as
a pure exigency founded in my being; it does not constitute
the slightest proof of the Other’s existence, not the slightest
bridge between me and the Other.
More precisely, this ontological relation between me and an
abstract Other, due to the very fact that it defines in general
my relation to others, is far from facilitating a particular on-
tic relation between me and Pierre; in fact it renders
impossible any concrete connection between my being and a
particular Other given in my experience. If my relation with
the Other is a priori, it thereby exhausts all possibility of
relation with others. Empirical and contingent relations can
be only the specifications of it, not particular cases. There can
be specifications of a law only under two circumstances: either
the law is derived inductively from empirical, particular
facts, and that is not the case here; or else it is a priori and
unifies experience, as the Kantian concepts do. Actually in this
latter case, its scope is restricted to the limits of experience: I
find in things only what I have put into them. Now the act
of relating two concrete “beings-in-the-world” can not
belong to my experience; and it therefore escapes from the
domain of being-with. But as the law precisely constitutes
Us own domain, it excludes a priori every real fact which it
has not constructed. The existence of time as an a priori form
of my sensibility would a priori exclude me from all connec-
hon with a noumenal time which had the characteristics of a
bemg. Thus the existence of an ontological and hence a
priori “being-with” renders impossible all ontic connection
viin a concrete human-reality which would arise for-itself-
as an absolute transcendent. The “being-with,” conceived as a
336 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
structure of my being, isolates me as surely as the arguments
for solipsism.
The reason for this is that Heidegger’s transcendence is a
concept in bad faith: it aims, to be sure, at surpassing
idealism, and it succeeds in so far as idealism presents us
with a subjectivity at rest in itself and contemplating its own
images. But the idealism thus surpassed is only a bastard form
of idealism, a sort of empirical-critical psychologism. Un-
doubtedly Heidegger’s human-reality “exists outside itself.”
But this existence outside itself is precisely Heidegger’s def-
inition of the self. It resemblet, neither the Platonic [Neo
Platonic?] ekstasis where existence is really alienation, exis-
tence in an Other, nor Malebranche’s vision in God, our own
conception of the ekstasis and of the internal negation. Hei-
degger does not escape idealism; his flight outside the self, as
an a priori structure of his being, isolates him as surely as the
Kantian reflection on the a priori conditions of our experi-
ence.^ In fact what human-reality rediscovers at the inaccessi-
ble limit of this flight outside itself is still the self: and the
flight outside the self is a flight toward the self, and the
world appears as the pure distance between the self and the
self.
Consequently it would be in vain to look in Sein und
Zeit for a simultaneous surpassing of all idealism and of all
realism. Heidegger’s attempt to bring human-reality out of its
so itude raises those same difficulties which idealism generally
encounters when it tries to found the existence of concrete
beings which are similar to us and which as such escape our
experience, which even as they are being constituted do not
arise from our a priori. He seems to escape isolation because
he takes the “outside of self” sometimes as being “outside-of-
selt-toward-self” and sometimes as “outside-self-in-others.”
aut the second interpretation of “outside of-self,” which Hei-
^ egger surreptitiously slides in through his devious reasoning,
is strictly incompatible with the first. Human-reality at the
very eart of its ekstases remains alone. It is here that we can
derive a new and valid insight as the result of our critical
examination of Heidegger’s teaching: Human-reality remains
a one ecause the Other’s existence has the nature of a con-
ingen and irreducible fact. We encounter the Other; we do
fnt. And if this fact still appears to us in the
. ^ ° ^”®^®®sity, yet it does not belong with those “condi-
ons of the possibility of our experience” or— if you prefer—
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
337
with ontological necessity. If the Other’s existence is a neces-
sity, it is a “contingent necessity”; that is, it is of the same
type as the factual necessity which is imposed on the cogito.
If the Other is to be capable of being given to us, it is
by means of a direct apprehension which leaves to the en-
counter its character as facticity, just as the cogito itself
leaves all its facticity to my own thought, a facticity which
nevertheless shares in the apodicity of the cogito itself — i.e.,
in its indubitability.
This long exposition of doctrine will not therefore have
been useless if it enables us to formulate the necessary and
sufficient conditions under which a theory of the existence of
others can be valid.
(1) Such a theory can not offer a new proof of the exis-
tence of others, or an argument better than any other against
solipsism. Actually if solipsism is to be rejected, this can not
be because it is impossible or, if you prefer, because nobody
is truly solipsistic. The Other’s existence will always be sub-
ject to doubt, at least if one doubts the Other only in words
and abstractly; in the same way that without really being able
to conceive of it, I can write, “I doubt my own existence.” In
short the Other’s existence can not be a probability. Proba-
bility can concern only objects which appear in our experi-
ence and from which new effecte can appear in our experience.
There is probability only if a validation or invalidation of it is
at every moment possible. Thus since the Other on principle
and in its “For-itself” is outside my experience, the proba- ’
bility of his existence as Another Self can never be either
validated or invalidated; it can be neither believed nor dis-
believed, it can not even be measured; it loses therefore its
very being as probability and becomes a pure fictional con-
jecture. In the same way M. Lalande^^ has effectively shown
that an hypothesis concerning the existence of living beings on
the planet Mars will remain purely conjectural with no
chance of being either true or false so long as we do not have
at our disposal instruments or scientific theories enabling us
^ produce facts validating or invalidating this hypothesis.
Fut the structure of the Other is on principle such that no
new experiment will ever be able to be conceived, that no
new theory will come to validate or invalidate the hypothesis
of his existence, that no instrument will come to reveal new
facts inspiring me to affirm or to reject this hypothesis. There-
^Les theories de Vinduction et de Vexpirimentation.
338 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
fore if the Other is not immediately present to me, and if
his existence is not as sure as my own, all conjecture con-
cerning him is entirely lacking in meaning. But if I do not
conjecture about the Other, then, precisely, I affirm him. A
theory of the Other’s existence must therefore simply question
me in my being, must make clear and precise the meaning
of that affirmation; in particular, far from inventing a proof,
it must make explicit the very foundation of that certainty. In
other words Descartes has not proved his existence. Actually I
have always known that I existed, I have never ceased to
practice the cogito. Similarly my resistance to solipsism —
which is as lively as any I should offer to an attempt to doubt
the cogito — proves that I have always known that the Other
existed, that I have always had a total though implicit com-
prehension of his existence, that this “prc-ontological” com-
prehension comprises a surer and deeper understanding of the
nature of the Other and the relation of his being to my being
than all the theories which have been built around it. If the
Other’s existence is not a vain conjecture, a pure fiction, this
is because there is a sort of cogito concerning it. It is this
cogito which we must bring to light by specifying its struc-
tures and determining its scope and its laws.
(2) On the other hand, Hegel’s failure has shown us that
the only point of departure possible is the Cartesian cogito.
Moreover the cogito alone establishes us on the ground of that
factual necessity which is the necessity of the Other’s exis-
tence. Thus what for lack of a better term we called the cogi-
to of the Other’s existence is merged with my own cogito.
The cogito examined once again must throw me outside it
and onto the Other, just as it threw me outside upon the In-
itself; and this must be done not by revealing to me an fl
priori structure of myself which would point toward an
equally a priori Other but by disclosing to me the concrete,
indubitable presence of a particular, concrete Other, just
as it has already revealed to me my own incomparable,
contingent but necessary, and concrete existence. Thus we
must ask the For-itself to deliver to us the For-others; we
must ask absolute immanence to throw us into absolute
transcendence. In my own inmost depths I must find not
reasons for believing that the Other exists but the Other
himself as not being me.
(3) What the cogito must reveal to us is not the-Other-as-
339
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
object. For a long time now it must have been obvious that
what is called an object is said to be probable. If the Other
is an object for me, he refers me to probability. But proba-
bility is founded solely on the infinite congruity of our repre-
sentations. Since the Other is neither a representation nor a
system of representations nor a necessary unity of our repre-
sentations, he can not be probable: he can not at first be an
object. Therefore if he is for us, this can be neither as a
constitutive factor of our knowledge of the world nor as a
constitutive factor of our knowledge of the self, but as one
who “interests” our being, and that not as he contributes a
priori to constitute our being but as he interests it concretely
and “ontically” in the empirical circumstances of our facticity.
(4) If we attempt somehow regarding the Other what
Descartes attempted to do for God with that extraordinary
“proof by the idea of perfection” which is wholly animated
by the intuition of transcendence, then for our apprehension
of the Other qua Other we are compelled to reject a certain
type of negation which we have called an external negation.
The Other must appear to the cogito as not being me. This
negation can be conceived in two ways: either it is a pure, ex-
ternal negation, and it will separate the Other from myself as
one substance from another substance — and in this case all
apprehension of the Other is by definition impossible; or else
it will be an internal negation, which means a synthetic,
active connection of the two terms, each one of which con-
stitutes itself by denying that it is the other. This negative re-
lation will therefore be reciprocal and will possess a twofold
inter! ority: This means first that the multiplicity of “Others”
will not be a collection but a totality (in this sense we admit
that Hegel is right) since each Other finds his being in the
Other.is It also means that this Totality is such that it is on
principle impossible for us to adopt “the point of view of the
whole.” In fact we have seen that no abstract concept of
consciousness can result from the comparison of my being-for-
myself with my object-state for the Other. Furthermore this
totality — like that of the For-itself — is a detotalized totality;
for since existence-for-others is a radical refusal of the Other,
no totalitarian and unifying synthesis of “Others” is possible.
It is in the light of these few observations that we in turn
shall now attack the question of The Other.
^ Chaque autrui trouve son etre en I’autre.
340 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
IV. THE LOOK
This woman whom I see coming toward me, this man who is
passing by in the street, this beggar whom I hear callmg
before my window, all are for me objects — of that there is no
doubt. Thus it is true that at least one of the modalities of
the Other’s presence to me is objecr-ness. But we have
seen that if this relation of object-ness is the fundamental
relation between the Other and myself, then the Other’s
existence remains purely conjectural. Now it is not only
conjectural but probable that this voice which I hear is that
of a man and not a song on a phonograph; it is infinitely
probable that the passerby whom I sec is a man and not a
perfected robot This means tliat without going beyond the
limits of probability and indeed because of this very prob-
ability, my apprehension of the Other as an object essentially
refers me to a fundamental apprehension of the Other in
which he will not be revealed to me as an object but as a
“presence in person.” In short, if the Other is to be a prob-
able object and not a dream of an object, then his object-ness
must of necessity refer not to an original solitude beyond my
reach, but to a fundamental connection in which the Other is
manifested in some way other than through the knowledge
which I have of him. The classical theories arc right in con-
sidering that every perceived human organism refers to some-
thing and that this to which it refers is the foundation and
guarantee of its probability. Their mistake lies in believing
that this^ reference indicates a separate existence, a conscious-
ness which would be behind its perceptible manifestations as
the noumenon is behind the Kantian Empfindung. Whether
or not this consciousness exists in a separate state, the face
which I see does not refer to it; it is not this consciousness
which is the truth of the probable object which I perceive.
the reference to a twin upsurge in which the
n presence for me to a “being-in-a-pair-with-the-
V given outside of knowledge proper even
n the latter be conceived as an obscure and unexpressible
order of intuition. In other words, the problem
of Others has generally been treated as if the primary relation
♦ 1 ^ Other is discovered is object-ness; that is, as if
the Other were first revealed — directly or indirectly— to our
perception. But since this perception by its very nature refers
to something other than to itself and since it can refer
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
341
neither to an infinite series of appearances of the same type —
as in idealism the perception of the table or of the chair does
— ^nor to an isolated entity located on principle outside my
reach, its essence must be to refer to a primary relation be-
tween my consciousness and the Other’s. This relation, in
which the Other must be given to me directly as a subject
although in connection with me, is the fundamental relation,
the very type of my being-for-others.
Nevertheless the reference here cannot be to any mystic
or ineffable experience. It is in the reality of everyday life
that the Other appears to us, and his probability refers to
everyday reality. The problem is precisely this: there is in
everyday reality an original relation to the Other which can
be constantly pointed to and which consequently can be re-
vealed to me outside all reference to a religious or mystic un-
knowable. In order to understand it I must question
more exactly this ordinary appearance of the Other in the
field of my perception; since this appearance refers to that
fundamental relation, the appearance must be capable of
revealing to us, at least as a reality aimed at, the relation to
which it refers.
^ I am in a public park. Not far away there is a lawn and
along the edge of that lawn there are benches. A man passes
by those benches. I see this man; I apprehend him as an object
and at the same time as a man. What does this signify? What
do I mean when I assert that this object is a man?
If I were to think of him as being only a puppet, I
should apply to him the categories which I ordinarily use to
group temporal-spatial “things.” That is, I should apprehend
him as being “beside” the benches, two yards and twenty
inches from the lawn, as exercising a certain pressure on the
ground, etc. His relation with other objects would be of the
purely additive type; this means that I could have him dis-
appear without the relations of the other objects around him
being perceptibly changed. In short, no new relation would
appear through him between those things in my universe;
grouped and synthesized from my point of view into instru-
mental complexes, they would from his disintegrate into mul-
tiplicities of indifferent relations. Perceiving him as a man,
On the other hand, is not to apprehend an additive relation
between the chair and him; it is to register an organization
without distance of the things in my universe around that
privileged object. To be sure, the lawn remains two yards
342 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
and twenty inches away from him, but it is also as a Iciwti
bound to him in a relation which at once both transcends
distance and contains it. Instead of the two terms of the
distance being indifferent, interchangeable, and in a reciprocal
relation, the distance is unfolded starting from the rnan whom
I see and extending up to the lawn as the synthetic upsurge
of a univocal relation. We are dealing with a relation which
is without parts, given at one stroke, inside of which there
unfolds a spatiality which is not my spatiality; for instead
of a grouping toward me of the objects, there is now an
orientation which flees from me.
Of course this relation witliout distance and without parts
is in no way that original relation of the Other to me which I
am seeking. In the first place, it concerns only the man and
the things in the world. In addition it is stUl an object of
knowledge; I shall express it, for example, by saying that this
man sees the lawn, or that in spite of the prohibiting sign
he is preparing to walk on the grass, etc. Finally it still retains
a pure character of probability: First, it is probable that this
object is a man. Second, even granted that he is a man, it re-
mains only probable that he sees the lawn at the moment that
I perceive him; it is possible that he is dreaming of some proj-
ect without exactly being aware of what is around him, or
that he is blind, etc., etc. Nevertheless this new relation of
the object-man to the object-lawn has a particular character;
it is simultaneously given to me as a whole, since it is there
in the world as an object which I can know (it is, in fact,
an objective relation which I express by saying: Pierre has
glanced at this watch, Jean has looked out the window, etc.),
and at the same time it entirely escapes me. To the extent
that the man-as-object is the fundamental term of this relation,
to the extent that the relation reaches toward him, it escapes
me. I can not put myself at the center of it The distance
which unfolds between the lawn and the man across the syn-
thetic upsurge of this primary relation is a negation of the
distance which I establish — as a pure type of external negation
— ^between these two objects. The distance appears as a pure
disintegration of the relations which I apprehend between the
objects of my universe. It is not I who realize this disin-
tegration; it appears to me as a relation which I aim at emptily
across the distances which I originally established be-
tween things. It stands as a background of things, a back-
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
343
ground which on principle escapes me and which is conferred
on them from without. Thus the appearance among the ob-
jects of my universe of an element of disintegration in that
universe is what I mean by the appearance of a man in my
universe.
The Other is first the permanent flight of things toward a
goal which I apprehend as an object at a certain distance from
me but which escapes me inasmuch as it unfolds about itself
its own distances. Moreover this disintegration grows by de-
grees; if there exists between the lawn and the Other a relation
which is without distance and which creates distance, then
there exists necessarily a relation between the Other and the
statue which stands on a pedestal in the middle of the lawn,
and a relation between the Other and the big chestnut trees
which border the walk; there is a total space which is grouped
around the Other, and this space is made with my space;
there is a regrouping in which I take part but which escapes
me, a regrouping of all the objects which people my universe.
This regrouping does not stop there. The grass is something
qualified; it is this green grass which exists for the Other; in
this sense the very quality of the object, its deep, raw green is
in direct relation to this man. This green turns toward the
Other a face which escapes me. I apprehend the relation of
the green to the Other as an objective relation, but I can not
apprehend the green as it appears to' the Other. Thus sudden-
ly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from
me. Everything is in place; everything still exists for me; but
everything is traversed by an invisible flight and fixed in the
direction of a new object. The appearance of the Other in the
world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole
universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines
the centralization which I am simultaneously effecting.
But the Other is still an object for me. He belongs to my
distances; the man is there, twenty paces from me, he is turn-
ing his back on me. As such he is again two yards, twenty
inches from the lawn, six yards from the statue; hence the
disintegration of my universe is contained within the limits of
this same universe; we are not dealing here with a flight of
the world toward nothingness or outside itself. Rather it ap-
pears that the world has a kind of drain hole in the middle
of its being and that it is perpetually flowing off through this
hole. The universe, the flow, and the drain hole are all once
ngain recovered, reapprehended, and fixed as an object. All
344
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
this is there for me as a partial structure of the world, even
though the total disintegration of the universe is involved.
Moreover these disintegrations may often be contained within
more narrow limits. There, for example, is a man who is read-
ing while he walks. The disintegration of the universe which
he represents is purely virtual: he has ears which do not hear,
eyes which see nothing except his book. Between his book and
him I apprehend an undeniable relation without distance
of the same type as that which earlier connected the walker
■with the grass. But this time the form has closed in on itself.
There is a full object for me to grasp. In the midst of the
world I can say “man-reading” as I could say “cold stone,V
“fine rain.” I apprehend a closed “Gestalt” in which the read-
ing forms the essential quality; for the rest, it remains blind
and mute, lets itself be known and perceived as a pure and
simple temporal-spatial thing, and seems to be related to the
rest of the world by a purely indiJfferent externality. The qual-
ity “man-reading” as the relation of the man to the book is
simply a little particular crack in my universe. At the heart
of this solid, visible form he makes himself a particular empty-
ing. The form is massive only in appearance; its peculiar
meaning is to be — in the midst of my universe, at ten paces
from me, at the heart of that massivity — a closely consolidated
and localized flight.
None of this enables us to leave the level on which the
Other is an object. At most we are dealing with a particular
type of objectivity akin to that which Husserl designated by
fee term absence without, however, his noting feat fee Other
is defined not as fee absence of a consciousness in relation to
the body which I see but by the absence of the world which
I perceive, an absence discovered at the very heart of my perr
ception of this world. On this level the Other is an object in
fee world, an object which can be defined by the world. But
feis relation of flight and of absence on the part of the world
in relation to me is only probable. If it is this which defines
the objectivity of the Other, then to what original presence
of the Other does it refer? At present we can give feis answer;
if fee Other-as-object is defined in connection with fee world
as the object which sees v/hat I see, then my fundamental con-
nection wife the Other-as-subject must be able to be referred
back to my permanent possibility of being seen by the Other.
It is in and through the revelation of my being-as-object for
the Other that I must be able to apprehend the presence of
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
345
his being-as-subject. For just as the Other is a probable object
for me-as-subject, so I can discover myself in the process of
becoming a probable object for only a certain subject. This
revelation can not derive from the fact that my universe is an
object for the Other-as~object, as if the Other’s look after
having wandered over the lawn and the surrounding objects
came following a definite path to place itself on me. I have
observed that I can not be an object for an object. A radical
conversion of the Other is necessary if he is to escape ob-
jectivity. Therefore I can not consider the look which the
Other directs on me as one of the possible manifestations
of his objective being; the Other can not look at me as he
looks at the grass. Furthermore my objectivity can not itself
derive for me from the objectivity of the world since I am
precisely the one by whom there is a world ; that is, the one
who on principle can not be an object for himself.
Thus this relation which I call “being-seen-by-another,”
far from being merely one of the relations signified by the
word man, represents an irreducible fact which can not be
deduced either from the essence of the Other-as-object, or
from my being-as-subject. On the contrary, if the concept of
the Other-as-object is to have any meaning, this can be only
as the result of the conversion and the degradation of that
original relation. In a word, my apprehension of the Other
in the world as probably being a man refers to my permanent
possibility of being-seen-by-him; that is, to the permanent
possibility that a subject who sees me may be substituted for
the^ object seen by me. “Being-seen-by-the-Other” is the truth
of “seeing-the-Other.” Thus the notion of the Other can not
under any circumstances aim at a solitary, extra-mundane con-
sciousness which I can not even think. The man is defined
by his relation to the world and by his relation to myself. He
is that object in the world which determines an internal flow
of the universe, an internal hemorrhage. He is the subject
who is revealed to me in that flight of myself toward objec-
tivation. But the original relation of myself to the Other is not
only an absent truth aimed at across the concrete presence of
an object in my universe; it is also a concrete, daily relation
which at each instant I experience. At each instant the Other
IS looking at me. It is easy therefore for us to attempt with
concrete examples to describe this fundamental connection
which must form the basis of any theory concerning the
Uther. If the Other is on principle the one who looks at me.
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
347
of them. This illusion stems from the fact that eyes as objects
of my perception remain at a precise distance which unfolds
from me to them (in a word, I am present to the eyes without
distance, but they are distant from the place where I “find my-
self”) whereas the look is upon me without distance while at
the same time it holds me at a distance — that is, its immediate
presence to me unfolds a distance which removes me from
it. I can not therefore direct my attention on the look without
at the same stroke causing my perception to decompose and
pass into the background. There is produced here something
analogous to what I attempted to show elsewhere in connec-
tion with the subject of the imagination.’’’ We can not, I said
then, perceive and imagine simultaneously; it must be either
one or the other. I should willingly say here: we can not per-
ceive the world and at the same time apprehend a look fas-
tened upon us; it must be either one or the other. This is
because to perceive is to look at, and to apprehend a look is
not to apprehend a look-as-object in the world (unless the
Jook is not directed upon us); it is to be conscious of being
looked at. The look which the eyes manifest, no matter
what kind of eyes they are, is a pure reference to myself. What
I apprehend immediately when I hear the branches crackling
behind me is not that there is someone there; it is that I am
vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt, that I
occupy a place and that I can not in any case escape from
the space in which I am without defense — in short, that I
am seen. Thus the look is first an intermediary which refers
from me to myself. What is the nature of this intermediary?
What does being seen mean for me?
Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I
have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a
keyhole. I am alone and on the level of a non-thetic self-con-
sciousness. This means first of all that there is no self to in-
habit my consciousness, nothing therefore to which I can refer
^y acts in order to qualify them. They are in no way
nown; I am my acts and hence they carry in themselves their
Whole justification. I am a pure consciousness of things, and
lUgs, caught up in the circuit of my selfness, offer to me
eir potentialities as the proof of my non-thetic consciousness
w ) my own possibilities. This means that behind that door a
spectacle is presented as “to be seen,” a conversation as “to
” t-‘lmaginaire. 1940.
348 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
be heard.” The door, the keyhole are at once both instru-
ments and obstacles; they are presented as “to be handled
with care”; the keyhole is given as “to be looked through close
by and a little to one side,” etc. Hence from this moment “I
do what I have to do.” No transcending view comes to confer
upon my acts the character of a given on which a judgment
can be brought to bear. My consciousness sticks to my acts,
it is my acts; and my acts are commanded only by the ends
to be attained and by the instruments to be employed. My
attitude, for example, has no “outside”; it is a pure process of
relating the instrument (the keyhole) to the end to be attained
(the spectacle to he seen), a pure mode of losing myself in the
world, of causing myself to be drunk in by things as ink is
by a blotter in order that an instrumental-complex oriented
toward an end may he synthetically detached on the ground of
the world. The order is the reverse of causal order. It is the
end to be attained which organizes all the moments which
precede it. The end justifies the means; the means do not
exist for themselves and outside the end.
Moreover the ensemble exists only in relation to a free
project of my possibilities. Jealousy, as the possibility which I
am, organizes this instrumental complex by transcending it to-
ward itself. But I am this jealousy; I do not know it. If I
contemplated it instead of making it, then only the wojldly
complex in instrumentality could teach it to me. This en-
semble in the world with its double and inverted determina-
tion (there is a spectacle to be seen behind the door only be-
cause I am jealous, but my jealousy is nothing except the
simple objective fact that there is a sight to he seen behind
the door) — this we shall call situation. This situation reflects
to me at once both my facticity and my freedom; on the
occasion of a certain objective structure of the world which
surrounds me, it refers my freedom to me in the form of tasks
to be freely done. There is no constraint here since my free-
into my possibles and since correlatively the poten-
tialities of the world indicate and offer only themselves. More-
over I can not truly define myself as being in a situation:
first because I am not a positional consciousness of myself;
second because I am my own nothingness. In this sense — and
since I am what I am not and since I am not what I am — ^I
can not even define myself as truly being in the process of
listening at doors. I escape this provisional definition of my-
self by means of all my transcendence. There as we have seen
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
349
is the origin of bad faith. Thus not only am I unable to know
myself, but my very being escapes — although I am that very
escape from my being — and I am absolutely nothing. There is
nothing there but a pure nothingness encircling a certain ob-
jective ensemble and throwing it into relief outlined upon the
world, but this ensemble is a real system, a disposition of
means in view of an end.
But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone
is looking at me! What does this mean? It means that I am
suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications
appear in my structure — modifications which I can apprehend
and fix conceptually by means of the reflective cogito.
First of all, I now exist as myself for my unreflective con-
sciousness. It is this irruption of the self which has been most
often described: F see myself because somebody sees me — as
it is usually expressed. This way of putting it is not wholly
exact. But let us look more carefully. So long as we considered
the for-itself in its isolation, we were able to maintain that
the unreflective consciousness can not be inhabited by a self;
the self was given in the form of an object and only for the
reflective consciousness. But here the self comes to haunt the
unreflective consciousness. Now the unreflective consciousness
is a consciousness of the world. Therefore for the unreflective
consciousness the self exists on the level of objects in the
world; this role which devolved only on the reflective con-
sciousness — ^the making-present of the self — ^belongs now to
the unreflective consciousness. Only the reflective conscious-
ness has the self directly for an object. The unreflective con-
sciousness does not apprehend the person directly or as its ob-
ject; the person is presented to consciousness in so far as the
person is an object for the Other. This means that all of a
sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in
that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in
that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself
only as I am a pure reference to the Other.
Nevertheless we must not conclude here that the object
is the Other and that the Ego present to my consciousness is a
secondary structure or a meaning of the Other-as-object; the
Other is not an object here and can not be an object, as we
have shown, unless by the same stroke my self ceases to be an
object-for-the-Other and vanishes. Thus I do not aim at the
Other as an object nor at my Ego as an object for myself;
I do not even direct an empty Intention toward that Ego as
350
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
toward an object presently out of my reach. In fact it is sep-
arated from me by a nothingness which I can not fill since I
apprehend it as not being for me and since on principle it
exists for the Other. Therefore I do not aim at it as if it could
someday be given me but on the contrary in so far as it on
principle flees from me and will never belong to me. Never-
theless I am that Ego; I do not reject it as a strange' image, but
it is present to me as a self which I am without knowing it;
for I discover it in shame and, in other instances, in pride. It
is shame or pride which reveals to me the Other’s look and
myself at the end of that look. It is the shame or pride which
makes me live, not know the situation of being looked at.
Now, shame, as we noted at the beginning of this chapter,
is shame of self; it is the recognition of the fact that I am in-
deed that object which the Other is looking at and judging. I
can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to
become a given object. Thus originally the bond between
my unreflective consciousness and my Ego, which is being
looked at, is a bond not of knowing but of being. Beyond
any knowledge which I can have, I am this self which another
knows. And this self which I am — ^this I am in a world which
the Other has made alien to me, for the Other’s look embraces
my being and correlatively the walls, the door, the keyhole.
AH these instrumental-things, in the midst of which I am,
now turn toward the Other a face which on principle escapes
me. Thus I am my Ego for the Other in the midst of a world
which flows toward the Other. Earlier we were able to call this
internal hemorrhage the flow of my world toward the Other-
as-object. This was because the flow of blood was trapped and
localized by the very fact that I fixed as an object in my world
that Other toward which this world was bleeding. Thus not a
^op of blood was lost; all was recovered, surrounded, local-
ized although in a being which I could not penetrate. Here on
the contrary the flight is without limit; it is lost externally; the
world^ flows out of the world and I flow outside myself. The
Other s look makes me be beyond my being in this world and
puts me in the midst of the world which is at once this world
and beyond this world. What sort of relations can I enter into
With this being which I am and which shame reveals to me?
, first place there is a relation of being. I am
tto being. I do not for an instant think of denying it; my
sname is a confession. I shall be able later to use bad faith so
as to hide it from myself, but bad faith is also a confession
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
351
since it is an effort to flee the being which I am. But I am
this being, neither in the mode of “having to be” nor in that
of “was”; I do not found it in its being; I can not produce it
directly. But neither is it the indirect, strict effect of my acts
as when my shadow on the ground or my reflection in the
mirror is moved in correlation with the gestures which I
make. This being which I am preserves a certain indetermina-
tion, a certain unpredictability. And these new characteristics
do not come only from the fact that I can not know the Other;
they stem also and especially from the fact that the Other is
free. Or to be exact and to reverse the terms, the Other’s
freedom is revealed to me across the uneasy indetermina-
tion of the being which I am for him. Thus this being is
not my possible; it is not always in question at the heart of
my freedom. On the contrary, it is the limit of my freedom,
its “backstage” in the sense that we speak of “behind the
scenes.” It is given to me as a burden which I carry without
ever being able to turn back to know it, without even being
able to realize its weight. If it is comparable to my shadow it
is like a shadow which is projected on a movihg and un-
predictable material such that no table of reference can be
provided for calculating the distortions resulting from these
movements. Yet we still have to do with my being and not
with an image of my being. We are dealing with my being as
it is written in and by the Other’s freedom. Everything takes
place as if I had a dimension of being from which I was sep-
arated by a radical nothingness; and this nothingness is the
Other’s freedom. The Other has to make my being-for-him be
in so far as he has to be his being. Thus each of my free
conducts engages me in a new environment where the very
stuff of my being is the unpredictable freedom of another.
Yet by my very shame I claim as mine that freedom of an-
other, I affirm a profound unity of consciousness, not that
harmony of monads which has sometimes been taken as a
guarantee of objectivity but a unity of being; for I accept and
wish that others should confer upon me a being which I rec-
ognize.
Shame reveals to me that I am this being, not in the mode
of “was” or of “having to be” but in-itself. When I am
alone, I can not realize my “being-seated”; at most it can be
said that I simultaneously both am it and am not it. But in
order for me to be what I am, it suffices merely that the Other
look at me. It is not for myself, to be sure; I myself shall
352 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
never succeed at realizing this being-seated which I grasp in
the Other’s look, I shall remain forever a consciousness. But
it is for the Other. Once more the nihilating escape of the
for-itself is fixed, once more the in-itself closes in upon the
for-itself. But once more this metamorphosis is effected at a
distance. For the Other I am seated as this inkwell is on the
table; for the Other, I am leaning over the keyhole as
this tree is bent by the wind. Thus for the Other I have
stripped myself of transcendence. This is because my tran-
scendence becomes for whoever makes himself a witness of it
(Le., determines himself as not being my transcendence) a
purely established transcendence, a given-transcendence; that
is, it acquires a nature by the sole fact that the Other confers
on it an outside. This is accomplished, not by any distortion or
by a refraction which the Other would impose on my transcen-
dence through his categories, but by his very being. If there is
an Other, whatever or whoever he may be, whatever may be
his relations with me, and without his acting upon me in
any way except by the pure upsurge of his being — then I
have an outside, I have a nature. My original fall is the exis-
tence of the Other. Shame — ^like pride — is the apprehension of
myself as a nature although that very nature escapes me and
is unknowable as such. Strictly speaking, it is not that I per-
ceive myself losing my freedom in order to become a thing,
but my nature is — over there, outside my lived freedom —
as a given attribute of this being which I am for the Other.
I grasp the Other’s look at the very center of my act as the
solidification and alienation of my own possibilities. In fear or
in anxious or prudent anticipation, I perceive that these possi-
bilities which I am and which are the condition of my tran-
scendence are given also to another, given as about to be tran-
scended in turn by his own possibilities. The Other as a look
is only that — my transcendence transcended. Of course I
still am my possibilities in the mode of non-thetic conscious-
n^s (of) these possibilities. But at the same time the look
alienates them from me. Hitherto I grasped these possibil-
ities thetically on the world and in the world in the form of
the potentialities of instruments: the dark corner in the hall-
way referred to me the possibility of hiding — as a simple
potential quality of its shadow, as the invitation of its dark-
ness. This quality or instrumentality of the object belonged
to it alone and was given as an objective, ideal property mark-
ing its real belonging to that complex which we have called
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
353
situation. But with the Other’s look a new organization of
complexes comes to superimpose itself on the first. To ap-
prehend myself as seen is, in fact, to apprehend myself as seen
in the world and from the standpoint of the world. The look
does not carve me out in the universe; it comes to search for
me at the heart of my situation and grasps me only in irre-
solvable relations with instruments. If I am seen as seated, I
must be seen as “seated-on-a-chair,” if I am grasped as bent
over, it is as “bent-over-the-keyhole,” etc. But suddenly the
alienation of myself, which is the act of being-looked-at, in-
volves the alienation of the world which I organize. I am seen
as seated on this chair with the result that I do not see it at
all, that it is impossible for me to see it, that it escapes me so
as to organize itself into a new and differently oriented com-
plex — ^with other relations and other distances in the midst
of other objects which similarly have for me a secret face.
Thus I, who in so far as I am my possibles, am what I
am not and am not what I am — ^behold now I am some-
body! And the one who I am — and who on principle es-
capes me — am he in the midst of the world in so far as
he escapes me. Due to this fact my relation to an object or
the potentiality of an object decomposes under the Other’s
look and appears to me in the world as my possibility of
utilizing the object, but only as this possibility on principle
escapes me; that is, in so far as it is surpassed by the Other
toward his own possibilities. For example, the potentiality of
the dark corner becomes a given possibility of hiding in the
corner by the sole fact that the Other^® can pass beyond it to-
ward his possibility of illuminating the corner with his flash-
light. This possibility is there, and I apprehend it but as
absent, as in the Other; I apprehend it through my anguish
and through my decision to give up that hiding place which is
too risky." Thus my possibilities are present to my unreflec-
tive consciousness in so far as the Other is watching me. K I
see him ready for anything, his hand in his pocket where he
has a weapon, his finger placed on the electric bell and ready
at the slightest movement on my part” to call the police, I
apprehend my possibilities from outside and through him at
the same time that I am my possibilities, somewhat as we
objectively apprehend our thought through language at the
same time that we think it in order to express it in language.
’®Tr. The French has Vauteur, “the author,” which I feel sure must be a
misprint for 1‘autrul, “the Other.”
354 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
This inclination to run away, which dominates me and carries
me along and which I am — this I read in the Other’s watch-
ful look and in that other look — ^the gun pointed at me. The
Other apprehends this inclination in me in so far as he has
anticipated it and is already prepared for it. He apprehends it
in me in so far as he surpasses it and disarms it. But I do
not grasp the actual surpassing; I grasp simply the death of
my possibility. A subtle death: for my possibility of hiding
stUl remains my possibility; inasmuch as I am it, it still lives;
and the dark corner does not cease to signal me, to refer its
potentiality to me. But if instrumentality is defined as the fact
of “being able to be surpassed toward then my very
possibility becomes an instrumentality. My possibility of
hiding in the comer becomes the fact that the Other can sur-
pass it toward his possibility of pulling me out of conceal-
ment, of identifying me, of arresting me. For the Other my
possibility is at once an obstacle and a means as all instru-
ments are. It is an obstacle, for it will compel him to certain
new acts (to advance toward me, to turn on his flashlight).
It is a means, for once I am discovered in this cul-de-sac,
I “am caught.” In other words every act performed against
the Other can on principle be for the Otlier an instru-
ment which will serve him against me. And I grasp the
Other not in the clear vision of what he can make out of my
act but in a fear which lives all my possibilities as ambiva-
lent. The Other is the hidden death of my possibilities in
so far as I live that death as hidden in the midst of the
world. The connection between my possibility and the in-
strument is no more than between two instruments which
are adjusted to each other outside in view of an end which
escapes me. Both the obscurity of the dark comer and my
possibility of hiding there are surpassed by the Other when,
before I have been able to make a move to take refuge there,
he throws the light on the corner. Thus in the shock which
seizes me when I apprehend the Other’s look, this happens
^ suddenly I experience a subtle alienation of alt my
possibilities, which are now associated with objects of the
world, far from me in the midst of the world.
Two important consequences result. The first is that my
possibility becomes a probability which is outside me. In so
far as the Other grasps it as eaten away by a freedom which
e IS not, in so far as he makes himself a witness of it and cal-
cu ates its results, it is a pure indetermination in the game of
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
355
' possibles, and it is precisely thus that I guess at it. Later when
we are in direct connection with the Other by language and
when we gradually learn what he thinks of us, this is the
thing which will be able at once to fascinate us and fill us
with horror.
“I swear to you that I will do it.”
“Maybe so. You tell me so. I want to believe you. It is in-
deed possible that you will do it.”
The sense of this dialogue implies that the Other is origi-
nally placed before my freedom as before a given property
of indetermination and before my possibles as before my
probables. This is because originally I perceive myself to be
over there for the Other, and this phantom-outline of my
being touches me to the heart. For in shame and anger and
fear I do not cease to assume myself as such. Yet I assume
myself in blindness since I do not know what I assume. I
simply am it.
On the other hand, the ensemble “instrument-possibility,”
made up of myself confronting the instrument, appears to me
as surpassed and organized into a world by the Other. With
the Other’s look the “situation” escapes me. To use an every-
day expression which better expresses our thought, I am no
longer master of the situation. Or more exactly, I remain
master of it, but it has one real dimension by which it escapes
me, by which unforeseen reversals cause it to be otherwise
than it appears for me. To be sure it can happen that in
strict solitude I perform an act whose consequences are com-
pletely opposed to my anticipations and to my desires; for
example I gently draw toward me a small platform holding
this fragile vase, but this movement results in tipping over a
bronze statuette which breaks the vase into a thousand pieces.
-Here, however, there is nothing which I could not have fore-
seen if I had been more careful, if I had observed the
arrangement of the objects, etc. — nothing which on principle
escapes me. The appearance of the Other, on the contrary,
causes the appearance in the situation of an aspect which I did
not wish, of which I am not master, and which on principle
escapes me since it is for the Other. This is what Gide has
appropriately called “the devil’s part.” It is the unpredictable
but still real reverse side.
It is this unpredictability which Kafka’s art attempts to
describe in The Trial and The Castle. In one sense, every-
thing which the Surveyor are doing belong" ^',,to
358 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
As a temporal-spatial object in the world, as an essential
structure of a temporal-spatial situation in the world, I offer
myself to the Other ' appraisal. This also I apprehend by the
pure exercise of the cogito. To be looked at is to apprehend
oneself as the unknown object of unknowable appraisals — in
particular, of value judgments. But at the same time that in
shame or pride I recognize the justice of these appraisals, I
do not cease to tak«. them for what they are — a free surpassing
of the given toward possibilities. A judgment is the tran-
scendental act of a free being. Thus being-seen constitutes
me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my
freedom. It is in this sense that we can consider ourselves as
“slaves” in so far as we appear to the Other. But this slavery
is not a historical result -capable of being surmounted — of a
life in the abstract form of consciousness. I am a slave to the
degree that my being is dependent at the center of a freedom
which is not mine and which is the very condition of my
being. In so far as I am the object of values which come to
qualify me without my being able to act on this qualification
or even to know it, T am enslaved. By the same token in so far
as I am the instrument of possibilities which are not my possi-
bilities, whose pure presence beyond my being I can not even
glimpse, and which deny my transcendence in order to con-
stitute me as a means to ends of which I am ignorant — am
in danger. This danger is not an accident but the permanent
structure of my heinv-for-others.
This brings us to the end of our description. Yet before
we can make use of it to discover just what the Other, is, we
must note that this description has been worked out entirely
iOn the level of the cogito. We have only made explicit the
.meaning of those subjective reactions to the Other’s look
which are fear (the feeling of being in danger before the
Other’s freedom), pride, or shame (the feeling of bemg
finally what I am but elsewhere, over there for the Other),
the recognition of my slavery (the feeling of the alienation of
all my possibilities). In addition this specification is not
merely a conceptual fixing of bits of knowledge more or less
obscure. Let each one refer to his own experience. There is no
one who has not at some time been surprised in an attitude
which was guilty or simply ridiculous. The abrupt modifica-
tion then experienced was in no way provoked by the irrup-
tion of knowledge. It is rather in itself a solidification and an
abrupt stratification of myself which leaves intact my possi-
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
359
bilities and my structures “for-myself,” but which suddenly
pushes me into a new dimension of existence — the dimension
of the unrevealed. Thus the appearance of the look is appre-
hended by me as the upsurge of an ekstatic relation of being,
of which one term is the “me” as for-itself which is what it is
not and which is not what it is, and of which the other term
is still the “me” but outside my reach, outside my action, out-
side my knowledge. This term, since it is directly connected
with the infinite possibilities of a free Other, is itself an in-
finite and inexhaustible synthesis of unrevealed properties.
Through the Other’s look I live myself as fixed in the midst of
the world, as in danger, as irremediable. But I know neither
what I am nor what is my place in the world, nor what face
this world in which I am turns toward the Other.
Now at last we can make precise the meaning of this up-
surge of the Other in and through his look. The Other is in
no way given to us as an object. The objectivation of the
^ Other would be the collapse of his being-as-a-look. Further-
more as we have seen, the Other’s look is the disappearance of
the Other’s eyes as objects which manifest the look. The
Other can not even be the object aimed at emptily at the
horizon of my being for the Other. The objectivation of the
Other, as we shall see, is a defense on the part of my being
which, precisely by conferring on the Other a being for-me,
frees me from my being-for the Other. In the phenomenon
of the look, the Other is on principle that which can not be
an object. At the same time we see that he can not be a limit-
ing term of that relation of myself to myself which makes
me arise for myself as the unrevealed. Neither can the Other
be the goal of my attention; if in the upsurge of the Other’s
look, I paid attention to the look or to the Other, this could
be only as to objects, for attention is an intentional direction
toward objects. But it is not necessary to conclude that the
Other is an abstract condition, a conceptual structure of the
ekstatic relation; there is here in fact no object really thought,
of which the Other could be a universal, formal structure. The
Other is, to be sure, the condition of my being-unrevealed.
But he is the concrete, particular condition of it. He is not
engaged in my being in the midst of the world as one of its
integral parts since he is precisely that which transcends this
world in the midst of which I am as non-revealed; as such he
can therefore be neither an object nor the formal, constituent
element of an object. He can not appear to me, as we have
360
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
seen, as a unifying or regulative category of my experience
since he comes to me through an encounter. Then what is the
Other?
In the first place, he is the being toward whom I do not
turn my attention. He is the one who looks at me and at
whom I am not yet looking, the one who delivers me to my-
self as unrevealed but without revealing himself, the one
who is present to me as directing at me but never as the ob-
ject of my direction; he is the concrete pole (though out of
reach) of my flight, of the alienation of my possibles, and
of the flow of the world toward another world which is
the same world and yet lacks all communication with it
But he can not be distinct from this same alienation and
flow; he is the meaning and the direction of them; he haunts
this flow not as a real or categorical element but as a presence
which is fixed and made part of the world if I attempt to
“make-it-present” and which is never more present, more
urgent than when I am not aware of it. For example if I am
wholly engulfed in my shame, the Other is the immense, in-
visible presence which supports this shame and embraces it
on every side; he is the supporting environment of my be-
ing-unrevealed. Let us see what it is which the Other mani-
fests as unrevealable across my lived experience of the un-
revealed.
First, the Other's look as the necessary condition of my
objectivity is the destruction of all objectivity for me. The
Other’s look touches me across the world and is not only a
transformation of myself but a total metamorphosis of the
world. I am looked-at in a world which is looked-at. In par-
ticular the Other’s look, which is a look-looking and not a
look-looked-at, denies mv distances from objects and unfolds
its own distances. This look of the Other is given immedi-
ately as that by which distance comes to the world at the
heart of a presence without distance. I withdraw; I am
stripped of my distanceless presence to my world, and I am
provided with a distance from the Other. There I am fifteen
paces from the door, six yards from the window. But the
Other comes searching for me so as to constitute me at a
certain distance from him. A& the Other constitutes me as at
six yards from him, it is necessary that he be present to me
without distance. Thus within the very experience of my
distance from things and from the Other, I experience the
distanceless presence of the Other to me.
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
361
Anyone may recognize in this abstract description that im-
mediate and burning presence of the Other’s look which has
so -often filled him with shame. In other words, in so far as
I experience myself as looked-at, there is realized for me a
trans-mundane presence of the Other. The Other looks at
me not as he is “in the midst of’ my world but as he comes
toward the world and toward me from all his transcendence;
when he looks at me, he is separated from me by no dis-
tance, by no object of the world — ^whether real or ideal — ^by
no body in the world, but by the sole fact of his nature as
Other. Thus the appearance of the Other’s look is not an ap-
pearance in the world — ^neither in “mine” nor in the “Oth-
er’s” — and the relation which unites me to the Other cannot
be a relation of exteriority inside the- world. By the Other’s
look I effect the concrete proof that there is a “beyond the
world.” The Other is present to me without any intermedi-
ary as a transcendence which is not mine. But lids presence
is not reciprocal. All of the world’s density is necessary in
order that I may myself be present to the Other. An omni-
present and inapprehensible transcendence, posited upon me
without intermediary as I am my being-unrevealed, a tran-
scendence separated from me by the infinity of being, as I
am plunged by this look into the heart of a world complete
with its distances and its instruments — such is the Other’s
look when first I experience it as a look.
Furthermore by fixing my possibilities the Other reveals
to me the impossibility of my being an object except for an-
other freedom. I can not be an object for myself, for I am
what I am; thrown back on its own resources, the reflective
effort toward a dissociation results in failure; I am always-
reapprehended by myself. And when I naively assume that
it is possible for me to be an objective being without being
responsible for it, I thereby implicitly suppose the Other’s
existence; for how could I be an object if not for a subject?
Thus for ine the Other is first the being for whom I am an
object; that is, the being through whom I gain my object-
ness. If I am to be able to conceive of even one of my prop-
erties in the objective mode, then the Other is already given.
He is given not as a being of my universe but as a pure sub-
ject. Thus this pure subject which by definition I am unable
to know — z.e., to posit as object — ^is always there out of
reach and without distance whenever I try to grasp myself
as object. In experiencing the look, in experiencing myself
362 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
as an unrevealed object-ness, I experience the inapprehensi-
ble subjectivity of the Other directly and with my being.
At the same time I experience the Other’s infinite freedom.
It is for and by means of a freedom and only for and by
means of it that my possibles can be limited and fixed. A
material obstacle can not fix my possibilities; it is only the
occasion for my projecting myself toward other possibles and
can not confer upon them an outside. To remain at home
because it is raining and to remain at home because one has
been forbidden to go out are by no means the same thing.
In the 'first case I myself determine to stay inside in con-
sideration of the consequences of my acts; I surpass the ob-
stacle “rain” toward myself and I make an instrument of it.
In the second case it is my very possibilities of going out or
of staying inside which are presented to me as surpassed and
fixed and which a freedom simultaneously foresees and pre-
vents. It is not mere caprice which causes us often to do very
natimally and without annoyance what would irritate us if
another commanded it. This is because the order and the
prohibition cause us to experience the Other’s freedom across
our own slavery. Thus in the look the death of my possibili-
ties causes me to experience the Other’s freedom. This death
is realized only at the heart of that freedom; I am inacces-
sible to myselJf and yet myself, thrown, abandoned at the
heart of the Other’s freedom. In connection with this ex-
perience my belonging to universal time can appear to me
only as contained and realized by an autonomous tempo-
ralization; only a for-itself which temporalizes itself can
throw me into time.
Thus through the look I experience the Other concretely
as a free, conscious subject who causes there to be a world
by temporalizing himself toward his own possibilities. That
subject’s presence without intermediary is the necessary con-
dition of all thought which I would attempt to form con-
cernmg myself. The Other is that “myself” from which
nothing separates me, absolutely nothing except his pure and
total freedom; that is, that indetermination of himself which
he has to be for and through himself.
We know enough at present to attempt to explain that
unshakable resistance which common sense has always op-
posed to the solipsistic argument. This resistance indeed is
ased on the fact that the Other is given to me as a concrete
evident presence which I can in no way derive from myself
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
363
and which can in no way be placed in doubt nor made the
object of a phenomenological reduction or of any other
f ^ 1 Q
e-n-oxV’
If someone looks at me, I am conscious of being an ob-
ject. But this consciousness can be produced only in and
through the existence of the Other. In this respect Hegel
was right. However that other consciousness and that other
freedom are never given to me; for if they were, they would
be known and would therefore be an object, which would
cause me to, cease being an object. Neither can I derive the
concept or the representation of them from my own back-
ground. First because I do not “conceive” them nor “repre-
sent” them to myself; expressions like these would refer us
again to “knowing,” which on principle is removed from
consideration. In addition this concrete proof of freedom
which I can effect by myself is the proof of my freedom;
every concrete apprehension of a consciousness is conscious-
ness (of) my consciousness; the very notion of consciousness
makes reference only to my possible conlsciousness. Indeed
we established in our Introduction that the existence of
freedom and of consciousness precedes and conditions their
essence; consequently these essences can subsume only con-
crete exemplifications of my consciousness or of my freedom.
In the third place the Other’s freedom and consciousness
can not be categories serving for the unification of my rep-
resentations. To be sure, as Husserl has shown, the ontologi-
cal structure of “my” world demands that it be also a world
for others. But to the extent that the Other confers a par-
ticular type of objectivity on the objects of my world, this
is because he is already in this world in the capacity of an
object. If it is correct that Pierre, who is reading before me,
gives a particular type of objectivity to the face of the book
which is turned toward him, then this objectivity is con-
ferred on a face which on principle I can see (although as
we have said, it escapes me in so far as it is read), on a face
which belongs to the world where I am and which conse-
quently by a magic bond is connected beyond distance to
Pierre-as-object. Under these conditions the concept of the
Other can in fact be fixed as an empty form and employed
constantly as a reinforcement of objectivity for the world
which is mine. But the Other’s presence in his look-looking
can not contribute to reinforce the world, for on the con-
*®Tr. Correction for eVoxv.
364 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
trary it undoes the world by the very fact that it causes the
world to escape me. The escape of the world from me when
it is relative and when it is an escape toward the Other-as-
object, reinforces objectivity. The escape of the world and
of my self from me when it is absolute and when it is ef-
fected toward a freedom which is not mine, is a dissolution
of my knowledge. The world disintegrates in order to be
reintegrated over there as a world; but this disintegration is
not given to me; I can not know it nor even think it. The
presence to me of the Other-as-a-look is therefore neither a
knowledge nor a projection of my being nor a form of unifi-
cation nor a category. It is and I can not derive it from me.
At the same time I can not make it fall beneath the stroke
of the phenomenological eiroxh' latter indeed has for
its goal putting the world within brackets so as to reveal
transcendental consciousness in its absolute reality. Whether
in general this operation is possible or not is something
which is not for us to decide here. But in the case which
concerns us the Other can not be put out of consideration
since as a look-looking he definitely does not belong to the
world. 1 am ashamed of myself before the Other, we said.
The phenomenological reduction must result in removing
from consideration the object of shame in order better to
make shame itself stand out in its absolute subjectivity. But
the Other is not the object of the shame; the object is my
act or my situation in the world. They alone can be strictly
“reduced.” The Other is not even an objective condition of
my shame. Yet he is as the very-being of it. Shame is the
revelation of the Other not in the way in which a conscious-
ness reveals an object but in the way in which one moment
of consciousness implies on the side another moment as its
motivation. If we should have attained pure consciousness
by means of the cogito, and if this pure consciousness were
only a consciousness (of being) shame, "the Other’s con-
sciousness would still haunt it as an inapprehensible pres-
ence and would thereby escape all reduction. This demon-
strates sufficiently that it is not in the world that the Other
is first to be sought but at the side of consciousness as a con-
sciousness in which and by which consciousness makes itself
be what it is. Just as my consciousness apprehended by the
cogito bears indubitable witness of itself and of its own ex-
istence, so certain particular consciousnesses — ^for example.
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS 365
“shame-consciousness” — ^bear indubitable witness to the cogito
both of themselves and of the existence of the Other.
But, someone may object, is this not simply because of the
Other’s look as meaning of my objectivity-for-myself? If so,
we shall fall back into solipsism; when I integrate myself as
an object in the concrete system of representations, the mean-
ing of this objectivation would be projected outside me and
hypostasized as the Other.
But we must note the following:
(1) My object-ness for myself is in no way a specification
of Hegel’s Ich bin Ich. We are not dealing with a formal
identity, and my being-as-object or being-for-others is pro-
foundly different from my being-for-myself. In fact the no-
tion of objectivity, as we observed in Part One, requires an
explicit negation. The object is that which is not my con-
sciousness; consequently it is that which does not have the
characteristics of consciousness since the only existent which
has for me the characteristics of consciousness is the con-
sciousness which is mine. Thus the Me-as-object-for-myself
is a Me which is not Me; that is, which does not have the
characteristics of consciousness. It is a degraded conscious-
ness; objectivation is a radical metamorphosis. Even if I
could see myself clearly and distinctly as an object, what I
should see would not be the adequate representation of what
I am in myself and for myself, of that “incomparable mon-
ster preferable to all else,” as Malraux puts it, but the appre-
hension of my being-outside-myself, for the Other; that is, the
objective apprehension of my being-other, which is radically
different from my being-for-myself, and which does not refer
to myself at all.
To apprehend myself as evil, for example, could not be to
refer myself to what I am for myself, for I am not and can
not be evil for myself for two reasons. In the first place, I
am not evil any more than I aw a civil servant or a physician.
In fact I am in the mode of not being what I am and of being
what I am not. The qualification “evil,” on the contrary,
characterizes me as an in-itself. In the second place, if I were
to be evil for myself, I should of necessity be so in the
mode of having to be so and would have to apprehend myself
and will myself as evil. But this would mean that I must dis-
cover myself as willing what appears to myself as the opposite
of my Good and precisely because it is the Evil or the opposite
of my Good. It is therefore expressly necessary that I will the
366
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
contrary of what I desire at one and the same moment and in
the same relation; that is, I would have to hate myself pre-
cisely as I am myself. K on the level of the for-itself I am to
realize fully this essence of evil, it would be necessary for me
to assume myself as evil; that is, I would have to approve my-
self by the same act which makes me blame myself. We can see
that tills notion of evil can in no way derive its origin from
me in so far as I am Me. It would be in vain for me to push the
ekstasis to its extreme limits or to effect a detachment from
self which would constitute me for myself; I shall never
succeed in conferring evil on myself or even in conceiving it
for myself if I am thrown on my own resources.
This is because I am my own detachment. I am my own
nothingness; simply because I am my own mediator between
Me and Me, all objectivity disappears. I can not be this
nothingness which separates me from me-as-object, for there
must of necessity be a presentation to me of the object which
I am. Thus I can not confer on myself any quality without
mediation or an objectifying power which is not my own
power and which I can neither pretend nor forge. Of course
this has been said before; it was said a long time ago that the
Other teaches me who I am. But the same people who uphold
this thesis affirm on the other hand that I derive the concept
of the Other from myself by reflecting on my own powers and
by projection or analogy. Therefore they remain at the center
of a vicious circle from which they can not get out. Actually
the Other can not be the meaning of my objectivity; he is the
concrete, transcending condition of it. This is because such
qualities as “evil,” “jealous,” ‘‘sympathetic” or “antipathetic”
and the like are not empty imaginings; when I use them to
qualify the Other, I am well aware that I want to touch him
in his being. Yet I can not live them as, my own realities. If
the Other confers them on me, they are admitted by what I
am for-myself; when the Other describes my character, I do
not “recognize” myself and yet I know that “it is me.” I ac-
cept the responsibility for this stranger who is presented to
me, but he does not cease to be a stranger. This is because he
IS neither a simple unification of my subjective representa-
tions, not a “Me” which I am in the sense of the Ich bin Ich,
nor an empty image which the Other makes of me for himself
u' which he alone bears the responsibility. This Me,
compared to the Me which I have to be, is
s Me but metamorphosed by a new setting and adapted to
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
367
that setting; it is a being, my being but with entirely new'
dimensions of being and new modalities. It is Me separated
from Me by an impassable nothingness, for I am this me but
I am not this nothingness which separates me from myself. It
is the Me which I am by an ultimate ekstasis which transcends
all my ekstases since it is not the ekstasis which I have to be.
My being for-others is a fall through absolute emptiness to-
ward objectivity. And since this fall is an alienation, I can
not make myself be for myself as an object; for in no case can
I ever alienate myself from myself.
(2) Furthermore the Other does not constitute me as an
object for myself but for him. In other words he does not
serve as a regulative or constitutive concept for the pieces of
knowledge which I may have of myself. Therefore the'
Other’s presence does not cause me-as-object to “appear.” I
apprehend nothing but an escape from myself toward .
Even when language has revealed that the Other considers me
evU or jealous, I shall never have a concrete intuition of my
evil or of my jealousy. These will never be more than fleeting
notions whose very nature will be to escape me. I shall not
apprehend my evil, but in relation to this or that particular
act I shall escape myself, I shall feel my alienation or my flow
toward ... a being which I shall only be able to think
emptily as evil and which nevertheless I shall feel that I am,
which I shall live at a distance through shame or fear.
Thus myself-as-object is neither knowledge nor a unity of
knowledge but an uneasiness, a lived wrenching away from
the ekstatic unity of the for-itself, a limit which I can not
reach and which yet I am. The Other through whom this Me
comes to me is neither knowledge nor category but the fact
of the presence of a strange freedom. In fact ray wrenching
away from myself and the upsiu-ge of the Other’s freedom
are one; I can feel them and live them only as an ensemble; I
can not even try to conceive of one without the other. The
fact of the Other is incontestable and touches me to the
heart. I realize him through uneasiness; through him I am
peipetually in danger in a world which is this world and
which nevertheless I can only glimpse. The Other does not
appear to me as a being who is constituted first so as to en-
counter me later; he appears as a being who arises in an
onginal relation of being with me and whose indubitability
and factual necessity are those of my own consciousness.
A number of difficulties remain. In particular there is the
368 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
fact that through shame we confer on the Other an indubi-
table presence. Now as we have seen, it is only probable that
the Other is looking at me. That farm at the top of the hill
seems to be looking at the commandos, and it is certain that
the house is occupied by the enemy. But it is not certain that
the enemy soldiers are at present watching through the win-
dows. It is not certain that the man whose footstep I hear be-
hind me is looking at me; his face could be turned away, his
look fixed on the ground or on a book. Finally in general it is
not sure that those eyes which are fixed on me are eyes;
they could be only “artificial ones” resembling real eyes. In
short must we not say that in turn the look becomes probable
because of the fact that I can constantly believe that I am
looked-at without actually being so? As a result does not our
certainty of the Other’s existence take on a purely hypothetical
character?
The difficulty can be expressed in these terms; On the
occasion of certain appearances in the world which seem to
me to manifest a look, I apprehend in myself a certain “being-
looked-at” with its own structures which refer me to the
Other’s real existence. But it is possible that I am mistaken;
perhaps the objects of the world which I took for eyes were
not eyes; perhaps it was only the wind which shook the bush
behind me; in short perhaps these concrete objects did not
really manifest a look. In this case what becomes of my cer-
tainty that I am looked-at? My shame was in fact shame
before somebody. But nobody is there. Does it not thereby
become shame before nobody? Since it has posited somebody
where there was nobody, does it not become a false shame?
This difficulty should not deter us for long, and we
should not even have mentioned it except that actually it can
help us in our investigation by indicating more purely the
nature of our being-for-others. There is indeed a confusion
here between two distinct orders of knowledge and two types
of being which can not be compared. We have always known
that the object-in-the-world can be only probable. This is
due to its very character as object. It is probable that the
passerby is a man; if he turns his eyes toward me, then al-
ffiough I immediately experience and with certainty the fact of
being-Iooked-at, I can not make this certainty pass into my
experience of the Other-as-object. In fact it reveals to me only
^ ^ Other-as-subject, a transcending presence to the world
an the real condition of my being-as-object. In every causal
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
369
state, therefore, it is impossible to transfer my certainty of
the Other-as-subject to the Other-as-object which was the
occasion of that certainty, and conversely it is impossible to
invalidate the evidence of the appearance of the Other-as-sub-
ject by pointing to the constitutional probability of the Other-
as-object. Better yet, the look, as we have shown, appears on
the ground of the destruction of the object which manifests
it. If this gross and ugly passerby shuffling along toward me
suddenly looks at me, then there is nothing left of his ugli-
ness, his obesity, and his shuffling. During the time that I
feel myself looked-at he is a pure mediating freedom be-
tween myself and me. The fact of being-looked-at can not
therefore depend on the object which manifests the look.
Since my shame as an Erlebnis which is reflectively apprehen-
sible is a witness for the Other for the same reason as it is its
own witness, I am not going to put it in question on the
occasion of an object of the world which can on principle be
placed in doubt. This would amount to doubting my own
existence, for the perceptions which I have of my own body
(when I see my hand, for example) are subject to error.
Therefore if the act of being-Iooked-at, in its pure form, is not
bound to the Other’s body any more than in the pure realiza-
tion of the cogito my consciousness of being a consciousness
is bound to my own body, then we must consider the ap-
pearance of certain objects in the field of my experience —
in particular the convergence of the Other’s eyes in my direc-
tion- — as a pure monition, as the pure occasion of realizing
my being-looked-at. In the same way for a Platonist the con-
tradictions of the sensible world are the occasion of effecting
a philosophical conversion. In a word what is certain is that
/ am looked-at; what is only probable is that the look is bound
to this or that intra-mundane presence. Moreover there is
nothing here to surprise us since as we have seen, it is never
eyes which look at us; it is the Other-as-subject.
Nevertheless, someone will say, the fact remains that I
can discover that I have been mistaken. Here I am bent over
the keyhole; suddenly I hear a footstep, I shudder as a wave
of shame sweeps over me. Somebody has seen me. I straighten
tip. My eyes run over the deserted corridor. It was a false
alarm. I breathe a sigh of relief. Do we not have here an ex-
perience which is self-destructive?
Let us look more carefully. Is it actually my being-as-ob-
ject for the Other which has been revealed as an error? By
370
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
no means. The Other’s existence is so far from being placed
in doubt that this false alarm can very well result in making
me give up my enterprise. If, on the other hand, I persevere in
it, I shall feel my heart beat fast, and I shall detect the
slightest noise, the slightest creaking of the stairs. Far from
disappearing with my first alarm, the Other is present every-
where, below me, above me, in the neighboring rooms, and I
continue to feel profoundly my being-for-others. It is even
possible that my sha -le may not disappear; it is my red face
as I bend over the keyhole. I do not cease to experience
my being-for-others; my possibilities do not cease to “^e,” nor
do the distances cease to unfold toward me in terms of the
stairway where somebody “could” be, in terms of this dark
comer where a human presence “could” hide. Better yet, if
I tremble at the sUghte.st noise, if each creak announces to me
a look, this is because I am already in the state of being-
looked-at. What then is it which falsely appeared and which
was self-destructive when I discovered the false alarm? It is
not the Other-as-subject, nor is it his presence to me. It is
the Other’s facticity; that is, the contingent connection be-
tween the Other and an object-being in my world. Thus what
is doubtful is not the Other himself. It is the Other’s being-
there; i.e., that concrete, historical event which we can express
by the words, “There is someone in this room.”
These observations may enable us to proceed further. The
Other’s presence in the world can not be derived analytically
frorn the presence of the Other-as-subject to me, for this
original presence is transcendent — i.e., being-beyond-the-
world. I believed that the Other was present in the room,
but I was mistaken. He was not there. He was “absent.”
What then is absence?
If we take the expression “absence” in its empirical and
everyday usage, it is clear that I do not use it to indicate just
any kind of “not-being-there.” In the first place, if I do
not find iny package of tobacco in its usual spot, I do not
say that it is absent even though I could declare that it
ought to be there.” This is because the place of a material
object or of an instrument, even though sometimes ‘it may be
precisely ^signed, does not derive from the nature of the
object or instrument. To be exact, its nature can barely be-
stow on it a location but it is through me that the place of an
instrument is realized. Human-reality is the being which
causes a place to come to objects. Human reality alone, in so
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
371
far as it is its own possibilities, can originally take a place. On
the other hand I shall not say that Aga-Khan or the Sultan of
Morocco is absent from this apartment, but I say that Pierre,
who usually lives here, is absent for a quarter of an hour. In
short, absence is defined as a mode of being of human-reality
in relation to locations and places which it has itself deter-
mined by its presence. Absence is not a nothingness of con-
nections with a place; on the contrary, I determine Pierre in
relation to a determined place by declaring that he is absent
from it. Finally I shall not speak of Pierre’s absence in relation
to a natural location even if he often passes by there. On the
other hand, I shall be able to lament his absence from a picnic
which “took place” in a part of the country where he has
never been. Pierre’s absence is defined in relation to a place
where he might himself determine himself to be, but this
place itself is delimited as a place, not by the site nor even by
the solitary relations of the location to Pierre himself, but
by the presence of other human-realities. It is in relation to
other people that Pierre is absent. Absence is Pierre’s concrete
mode of being in relation to Therese; it is a bond between hu-
man-realities, not between human-reality and the world. It
is in relation to Therese that Pierre is absent from this lo-
cation. Absence therefore is a bond of being between two
or several human-realities which necessitates a fundamen-
tal presence of these realities one to another and which,
moreover, is only one of the particular concretizations of this
presence. For Pierre to be absent in relation to Therese is a
particular way of his being present. In fact absence has mean-
ing only if all the relations of Pierre with Therese are pre-
served: he loves her, he is her husband, he supports her, etc.
In particular, absence supposes the maintenance of the con-
crete existence of Pierre: death is not an absence. Due to this
fact the distance from Pierre to Therese in no way changes the
fundamental fact of their reciprocal presence. In fact if we
consider this presence from the point of view of Pierre, we
see that it means either that Therese is existing in the midst
of the world as the Other-as-object, or else that he feels that
he exists for Therese as for the Other-as-subject. In the first
case the distance is made contingent and signifies nothing in
relation to the fundamental fact that Pierre is the one by
whom “there is” a world as a Totality and that Pierre is pres-
ent without distance to this world as the one through whom
the distance exists. In the second case Pierre feels himself
372 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
existing for Ther^se without distance: she is at a distance from
him to the extent that she is removed and unfolds a distance
between her and him; the entire world separates him from
her. But for her he is without distance inasmuch as he is an
object in the world which she makes come into being. Con-
sequently in each case removal can not modify these essential
relations. Whether the distance is small or great, between
Pierre-as-object and Therese-as-subject, between Th6rese-as-
object and Pierre-as-subject there is the infinite density of a
world. Between Pierre-as-subject and Therese-as-object, and
again between Therese-as-subject and Pierre-as-object there is
no distance at all. Thus the empirical concepts of absence
and of presence are two specifications of a fundamental pres-
ence of Pierre to Th6rese and of Th6rese to Pierre. They are
only different ways of expressing the presence and have
meaning only through it. At London, in the East Indies, in
America, on a desert island, Pierre is present to Therese who
remains in Paris; he will cease to be present to her only at his
death.
TIus is because a being is not situated in relation to
locations by means of degrees of longitude and latitude. He is
situated in a human space — ^between “the Guermantes way”
and “Swann’s way,” and it is the immediate presence of Swann
and of the Duchesse de Guermantes which allows the unfold-
ing of the “hodologicar’2^ space in which he is situated. Now
this presence has a location in transcendence; it is the pres-
ence-to-me in transcendence of my cousin in Morocco which
affows me to unfold between him and me this road which
situates-me-in-the-world and which can be called the road to
Morocco. This road, indeed, is nothing but the distance
between the Other-as-object which I could perceive in connec-
tion with my being-for” and the Other-as-subject who is pres-
ent to me without distance. Thus I am situated by the infinite
^versity of the roads which lead me to the object of my world
in correlation with the immediate presence of transcendent
subjects. And as the world is given to me all at once with all
Its beings, these roads represent only the ensemble of instru-
mental complexes which allow me to cause an Other-as-object
tuT'I’ ^ expression borrowed from Lewin and explained by Sartre in
mo otu, pp. 57 ^ and 65. It refers to a map or spatial organization
our environment in terms of our acts and needs. “The Guermantes
. Swann's way" are references to Proust’s Remembrance of
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
373
to appear as a “this” on the ground of the world, an Other-
as-object who is already implicitly and really contained there.
But these remarks can be generalized; it is not only Pierre,
Rene, Lucien, who are absent or present in relation to me on
the ground of original presence, for they are not alone in con-
tributing to situate me; I am situated also as a European in
relation to Asiatics, or to Negroes, as an old man in relation to
the young, as a judge in relation to delinquents, as a bour-
geois in relation to workers, etc. In short it is in relation to
every living man that every human reality is present or absent
on the ground of an original presence. This original presence
can have meaning only as a being-looked-at or as a being-
looking-at; ■ that is, according to whether the Other is an ob-
ject for me or whether I'myself am an object-for-the-Other.
Being-for-others is a constant fact of my human reality, and I
grasp it with its factual necessity in every thought, however
slight, which I form concerning myself. V^erever I go, what-
ever I do, I only succeed in changing the distances between
me and the Other-as-object, only avail myself of paths toward
the Other. To withdraw, to approach, to discover this partic-
ular Other-as-object is only to effect empirical variations on
the fundamental theme of my being-for-others. The Other is
present to me everywhere as the one through whom I become
an object. Hence I can indeed be mistaken concerning the
empirical presence of an Other-as-object whom I happen to
encounter on my path. I can indeed believe that it is Annie
who is coming toward me on the road and discover that it is
an unknown person; the fundamental presence of Annie to me
is not thereby changed. I can indeed believe that it is a man
who is watching me in the half light and discover that it is a
trunk of a tree which I took for a human being; my funda-
mental presence to all men, the presence of all men to myself
is not thereby altered. For the appearance of a man as an ob-
ject in the field of my experience is not what informs me that
there are men. My certainty of the Other’s existence is inde-
pendent of these experiences and is, on the contrary, that
which makes them possible.
What appears to me then about which I can be mistaken
IS mot the Other nor the real, concrete bond between tlie
Other and Me; it is a this which can represent a man-as-object
as well as not represent one. What is only probable is the dis-
tance and the real proximity of the Other; that is, his character
as an object and his belonging to the world which I cause to
374 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
be revealed are not doubtful inasmuch as I make an Other
appear by my very upsurge. However this objectivity dissolves
in the world as the result of the Other’s being “an Other
somewhere in the world.” The Other-as-object is certain as
an appearance correlative with the recovery of my subjectivity,
but it is never certain that the Other is that object. Similar-
ly the fundamental fact, my being-as-object for a subject is
accompanied by evidence of the same type as reflective evi-
dence, but the case is not the same for the fact that at this pre-
cise moment and for a particular Other, I am detached as
on the ground of the world rather than remaining
drowned in the indistinction of the ground. It is indubitable
that at present I exist as an object for some German or other.
But do I exist as a Frenchman, as a Parisian in the indifferen-
tiation of these collectivities or in my capacity as this Parisian
around whom the Parisian population and the French collec-
tivity are suddenly organized to serve for him as ground? On
this point I shall never obtain anything but bits of probable
knowledge although they can be infinitely probable.
We are able now to apprehend the nature of the look. In
every look there is the appearance of an Other-as-object as a
concrete and probable presence in my perceptive field; on the
occasion of certain attitudes of that Other I determine my-
self to apprehend — through shame, anguish, etc . — ^my be-
ing-looked-at. This “being-1 ooked-at” is presented as the
pure probability that I am at present this concrete this — a
probability which can derive its meaning and its very nature
as probable, only from a fundamental certainty that the
Other is always present to me inasmuch as I am always jor-
others. The proof of my condition as man, as an object for
all other living men, as thrown in the arena beneath mil-
lions of looks and escaping myself millions of times — ^this
proof I realize concretely on the occasion of the upsurge of
an object into my universe if this object indicates to me that
I am probably an object at present functioning as a differ-
entiated this for a consciousness. The proof is the ensemble
of the phenomenon which we call the look. Each look makes
us prove concretely—and in the indubitable certainty of the
cogito ^that we exist for all living men; that is, that there
are (some) consciousnesses for whom I exist. We put “some”
between parentheses to indicate that the Other-as-subject
present to me in this look is not given in the form of plu-
raiitv anv more than as unity (save in its concrete relation to
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
375
one particular Other-as-object) . Plurality, ia fact, belongs
only to objects; it comes into being through the appearance
of a world-making For-itself. Being-Iooked-at, by causing
(some) subjects to arise for us, puts us in the presence of an
unnumbered reality.
By contrast, as soon as I look at those who are looking at
me, the other consciousnesses are isolated in multiplicity. On
the other hand if I turn away from the look as the occasion
of concrete proof and seek to think emptily of the infinite
indistinction of the human presence and to unify it under
the concept of the infinite subject which is never an object,
then I obtain a purely formal notion which refers to an in-
finite series of mystic experiences of the presence of the
Other, the notion of God as the omnipresent, infinite sub-
ject for whom I exist. But these two objectivations, the con-
crete, enumerating objectivation and the unifying, abstract
objectivation, both lack proved reality — ^that is, the prenu-
merical presence of the Other.
These few remarks will become more concrete if we recall
an experience familiar to everybody: if we happen to appear
“in public” to act in a play or to give a lecture, we never
lose sight of the fact that we are looked at, and we execute
the ensemble of acts which we have come to perform in the
presence of the look; better yet we attempt to constitute a
being and an ensemble of objects for this look. While we
are speaking, attentive only to the ideas which we wish to
develop, the Other’s presence remains undifferentiated. It
would be false to unify it under the headings class, audi-
ence, etc. In fact we are not conscious of a concrete and in-
dividualized being with a collective consciousness; these are
images which will be able to serve after the event to trans-
late our experience and which will more than half betray it.
But neither do we apprehend a plural look. It is a matter
rather of an intangible reality, fleeting and omnipresent,
which realizes the unrevealed Me confronting us and which
collaborates with us in the production of this Me which es-
capes us. If on the other hand, I want to verify that my
thought has been well understood and if in turn I look at
the audience, then I shall suddenly see heads and eyes ap-
pear. When objectivized the prenumerical reality of the Oth-
er is decomposed and pluralized. But the look has disap-
peared as well. It is for this prenumerical concrete reality
that we ought to reserve the term “they” rather than for
376 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
human reality’s state of unauthenticity. Wherever I am, they
are perpetually looking at me. The they can never be appre-
hended as an object, for it immediately disintegrates.
Thus the look has set us on the track of our being-for-
others and has revealed to us the indubitable existence of
this Other for whom we are. But it can not lead us any fur-
ther. What we must examine next is the fundamental rela-
tion of the Me to the Other as he has been revealed to us.
Or if you prefer, we must at present make explicit and fix
thematically everything which is included within the limits
of this original relation and ask what is the being of this
being-for-others.
There is one consideration which may be drawn from the
preceding remarks and which will be of help to us. This is
the fact that being-for-others is not an ontological structure
of the For-itself. We can not think of deriving being-for-
, others from a being-for-itself as one would derive a conse-
quence from a principle, nor conversely can we think of de-
riving being-for-itself from being-for-others. Of course our
human-reality must of necessity be simultaneously for-itself
and for-others, but our present investigation does not aim at
constituting an anthropology. It would perhaps not be im-
possible to conceive of a For-itself which would be wholly
free from all For-others and which would exist \vithout even
suspecting the possibility of being an object. But this For-
itself simply would not be “man.” What the cogito reveals
to us here is just factual necessity: it is found — and this is
indisputable — ^that our being along with its being-for-itself
is also for-others; the being which is revealed to the reflec-
tive consciousness is for-itself-fdr-others. The Cartesian
cogito only makes an affirmation of the absolute truth of a
fact that of my existence. In the same way the cogito, a
little expanded as we are using it here, reveals to us as a fact
the eristence of the Other and my existence for the Other.
That is all we can say. It is also true that my being-for-others
as the upsurge of my consciousness into being has the char-
acter of an absolute event. Since this event is at once an his-
tqnzation — for I tempdralize myself as presence to others —
condition, of all history, we shall call it a prehistoric
histbrization. -It is as a prehistoric temporalization of simul-
taneity that we shall consider it here. By prehistoric we do
not mean that it is in a time prior to history — ^which would
not make sense — but that it is a part of that orfginal tern-
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS 377
poralization which historicizes itself while making history
possible. It is as fact — as a primary and perpetual fact — ^not
as an essential necessity that we shall study being-for-others.
We have seen previously the difference which separates the
internal type of negation from the external negation. In par-
ticular we have noted that the foundation of all knowledge
of a determined being is the original relation by which in
its very upsurge the For-itself has to be as not being this
being. The negation which the For-itself thus realizes is an
internal negation: the For-itself realizes it in its full freedom.
Better yet, the for-itself is this negation in so far as it chooses
itself as finitude. But the negation binds the For-itself in-
dissolubly to the being which it is not, and we have been
able to state that the For-itself includes in its being the being
of the object which it is not, inasmuch as its being is in
question as not being this being.
These observations are applicable without any essential
change to the primary relation of the For-itself with the
Other. If in general there is an Other, it is necessary above
all that T be the one who is not the Other, and it is in this
very negation effected by me upon myself that I make my-
self be and that the Other arises as the Other. This negation
which constitutes my being and which, as Hegel said, makes
me appear as the Same confronting the Other, constitutes
me on the ground of a non-thetic selfness as “Myself.” We
need not understand by this that a Self comes to dwell in
our consciousness but that selfness is reinforced by arising
as a negation of another selfness and that this reinforcement
is positively apprehended as the continuous choice of self-
ness by itself as the same selfness and as this very selfness.
A for-itself which would have to be a self without being
itself would be conceivable. The For-itself which I am sim-
ply has to be what it is in the form of a refusal of the Oth-
er; that is, as itself. Thus by utilizing the formulae applied
to the knowledge of the Not-me in general, we can say that
the For-itself as itself includes the being of the Other in its
being in so far as its being is in question as not being the
Other, In other words, m order for a consciousness to be
able to not-be the Other and therefore in order that there
may be an Other without making this non-being, which is
the condition of the self of consciousness, become purely and
simply the object of the establishment of a “third man” as
witness, two things are necessary; consciousness must have
378
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
to be itself and must spontaneously have to be this non-
being; consciousness must freely disengage itself from t e
Other and wrench itself away by choosing itself as ^
ingness which is simply Other than the Other and thereby
must be reunited in “itself.” This very detachment, wh^ich
is the being of the For-itself, causes there to be an Other.
This does not mean that it gives being to the Other but sim-
ply that it gives to the Other its being-other or the essentia
condition of the “there is.” It is evident that for the For-
itself the mode of being-what-is-not-the-Other is wholly para-
lyzed by Nothingness; the For-itself is what is not the Othei
in the nihilating mode of “reflection-reflecting.” The not-be
ing-the-Other is never given but perpetually chosen in i
perpetual resurrection: consciousness can not-be the Othe
only in so far as it is consciousness (of) itself as not bein]
the Other. Thus the internal negation, here as in the case o
presence to the world, is a unitary bond of being. It is nec
essary that the Other be present to consciousness in ever;
part and even that it penetrate consciousness completely i
order that consciousness precisely by being nothing may es
cape that Other who threatens to ensnare it. If consciousnes
were abruptly to be something, the distinction between il
self and the Other would disappear at the heart of a toti
undifferentiation.
This description, however, allows an essential additio
which will radically modify its implications. When consciou:
ness realized itself as not being a particular this in the worlc
the negative relation was not reciprocal. The this confronte
did not make itself not-be consciousness; it was determine
in and through consciousness not- to be consciousness; its r<
lation to consciousness remained that of pure indifferent ej
teriority. This is because the- “this” preserved its nature £
in-itself, and it was as in-itself that it was revealed t
consciousness in the very negation by which the For-itse
made itself be by denying that it was in-itself. But with n
gard to the Other, - on the contrary, the internal negath
relation is a relation,, of reciprocity. The being which coi
^yfciousness has to not-be is defined as a being which has 1
not-be this consciousness. This is because at the time of tl
perception of the this in the world, consciousness differe
frorn the this not only by its own individuality but also i
its mode of being. It was For-itself confronting the In-itsel
In the upsurge of the Other, however, consciousness is i
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHE^RS 379
no way different from the Other so far as its mode of being
is concerned. The Other is what consciousness is. The Other
is For-itself and consciousness, and he refers to possibles
which are bis possibles; he is himself by excluding the Oth-
er. There can he (.o question of viewing this opposition to
the Other in terms of a pure numerical determination. We
do not have two or several consciousnesses here; numbering
supposes an external witness and is tht pure and simple es-
tablishment of exteriority. Tiere can be an Other for the
For-itself only in a spontaneous and prenumerical negation.
The Other exist.s for consciousness only as a refused self.
But precisely because the Other is a self, he can himself be
refused for and through me only in so far as it is his self
which refuses me. I can neither apprehend nor conceive of
a consciousness which does not apprehend me. The only
consciousness which exists without apprehending me or re-
fusing me and which I myself can conceive is not a con-
sciousness isolated somewhere outside the world; it is my
own. Thus the Other whom I recognize in order to refuse
to be him is before all else the one for whom my For-itself
is. Not only do I make myself not-be this other being by
denying that he is me, I m^e myself not-be a being who is
making himself not-be me.
This double negation, however, is in a sense self-destruc-
tive. One of two things happens: Either I make myself not-
be a certain being, and then he is an object for me and I
lose my object-ness for him; in this case the Other ceases to
be the Other-Me — ^that is, the subject who makes me be an
object by refusing to be me. Or else this being is indeed the
Other and makes himself not-be me, in which case I become
an object for him and he loses his own object-ness. Thus
originally the Other is the Not-Me-not-object. Whatever may
be the further steps in the dialectic of the Other, if the
Other is to be at the start the Other, then on principle he
can not be revealed in the same upsurge by which I deny
being him. In this sense my fundamental negation can not
be direct, for there is nothing on which it can be brought
to bear. What I refuse to be can be nothing but this refusal
to be the Me by means of which the Other is making me an
object. Or, if you prefer, I refuse my refused Me; I deter-
mine myself as Myself by means of die refusal of the Me-
refused; I posit this refused Me as an alienated-Me in the
same upsurge in which I wrench myself away from tlic Oth-
380 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
er. But I thereby recognize and affirm not only the Other
but the existence of my Self-for-others. Indeed this is be-
cause I can not not-be the Other unless I assume my being-
as-object for the Other. The disappearance of the alienated
Me would involve the disappearance of the Other through
the collapse of Myself. I escape the Other by leaving him
with my alienated Me in his hands. But as I choose myself
as a tearing away from the Other, I assume and recognize as
mine this alienated Me. My wrenching away from the Other
— ^that is, my Self — is by its essential structure an assump-
tion as mine of this Me which the Other refuses; we can
even say that it is only that.
Thus this Me which has been alienated and refused is
simultaneously my bond with the Other and the symbol of
our absolute separation. In fact to the extent that I am The
One who makes there be an Other by means of the aSirma-
tion of my selfness, the Me-as-object is mine and I claim it;
for the separation of the Other and of myself is never giv-
en; I am perpetually responsible for it in my being. But in
so far as the Other is co-responsible for our original separa-
tion, this Me escapes me since it is what the Other makes
himself not-be. Thus I claim as mine and for me a Me
which escapes me. And since I make myself not-be the Oth-
er, in so far as the Other is a spontaneity identical with
mine, it is precisely as Me-escaping-myself that I claim this
Me-as-object. This Me-as-object is the Me which I am to
the exact extent that it escapes me; in fact I should refuse it
as mine if it could coincide with myself in a pure selfness.
Thus my being-for-others — i.e., my Me-as-object — is not
an image cut off from me and growing in a strange con-
sciousness. It is a perfectly real being, my being as the
condition of my selfness confronting the Other and of the
Other’s selfness confronting me. It is my being-outside
not a being passively submitted to which would itself have
corne to me from outside, but an outside assumed and rec-
ognized as my outside. In fact it is possible for me to deny
that the Other is me only in so far as the Other is himself a
subject. If I immediately refused the Other as pure object' — ■
that is, as existing in the midst of the world — it would not
be the Other which I refused but rather an object which on
principle had nothing in common with subjectivity. I should
remain defenseless before a total assimilation of myself to
t e Other for failing to take precautions within the true
381
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
province of the Other — subjectivity— which is also my prov-
ince. But this limit can neither come from me nor be thought
by me, for I can not limit myself; otherwise I should be a
finite totality. On the other hand, in Spinoza’s terms, thought
can be limited only by thought. Consciousness can be limit-
ed only by my consciousness. Now we can grasp the nature
of my Self as-object: it is the limit between two conscious-
nesses as it is produced by the limiting consciousness and
assumed by the limited consciousness. And we must under-
stand it in the two senses of the word “limit.” On the side
of the limiting, indeed, the limit is apprehended as the con-
tainer which contains me and surrounds me, the shell of
emptiness which pleads for me as a totality while putting
me out of play; on the side of the limited, it is wholly a
phenomenon of selfness and is as the mathematical limit is
to the series which progresses toward it without ever reach-
ing it. Every being which I have to be is at its limit like an
asymptotic curve to a straight line. Thus I am a detotalized
and indefinite totality, contained within a finite totality
which surrounds me at a distance and which I am outside
myself without ever being able either to realize it or even to
touch it;
A good comparison for my efforts to apprehend myself
and their futility might be found in that sphere described by
Poincare in which the temperature decreases as one goes from
its center to its surface. Living beings attempt to arrive at the
surface of this sphere by setting out from its center, but the
lowering of temperature produces in them a continually in-
creasing contraction. They tend to become infinitely flat pro-
portionately to their approaching their goal, and because of
this fact they are separated from the surface by an inflnite dis-
tance. Yet this limit beyond reach, the Self-as-object, is not
ideal; it is a real being. This being is not in-itself, for it is
not produced in the pure exteriority of indifference. But
neither is it for-itself, for it is not the being which I have to
be by nihilating myself. It is precisely my being-for-others,
this being which is divided between two negations with
opposed origins and opposite meanings. For the Other is not
this Me of which he has an intuition and 7 do not have the
intuition of this Me which I am. Yet this Me, produced l3y
the one and assumed by the other, derives its absolute reality
from the fact that it is the only separation possible between
two beings fundamentally identical as regards their mode of
382
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
being and immediately present one to the other; for since con-
sciousness alone can limit consciousness, no other mean is
conceivable between them.
In view of this presence of the Other-as-subject to me in
and through my assumed object-ness, we can see that my
making an object out of the Other must be the second mo-
ment in my relation to him. In fact the Other’s presence be-
yond my unrevealed limit can serve as motivation for my re-
apprehension of myself as a free selfness. To the extent that I
deny that I am the Other and as the Other is first manifested,
he can be manifested only as the Other; that is, as a subject
beyond my limit, as the one who limits me. In fact nothing
can limit me except the Other. Therefore he appears as the
one who in his full freedom and in his free projection to-
ward his possibles puts me out of play and strips me of my
transcendences by refusing to '‘join in” (in the sense of the
German mitmachen). Thus at first I must grasp only that
one of the two negations for which I am not responsible, the
one which does not come to me through myself. But in the
very apprehension of this negation there arises the conscious-
ness (of) myself as myself; that is, I can obtain an explicit
self-consciousness inasmuch as I am also responsible for a ne-
gation of the Other which is my own possibility. This is the
process of making explicit the second negation, Ae one which
proceeds from me to the Other. In truth it was already there
but hidden by the other negation since it was lost in order to
make the other appear. But the other negation is the reason
for the appearance of the new one; for if there is an Other
who puts me out of play by positing my transcendence as
purely contemplated, this is because I wrench myself away
from the Other by assuming my limit. The consciousness
(of) this wrenching away of the consciousness of (being)
the same in relation to the Other is the consciousness (of)
my free spontaneity. By this very wrenching away which puts
the Other in possession of my limit, I am already putting the
Other out of play. Therefore in so far as I am conscious (of)
myself as of one of my free possibilities and in so far as I
project myself toward myself in order to realize this selfness,
to that extent I am responsible for the existence of the Other.
It is I who by the very affirmation of my free spontaneity cause
there to be an Other and not simply an infinite reference of
consciousness to itself. Tlie Other then finds himself put out
of play; he is now what it depends on me to not-be, and
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS 383
thereby his transcendence is no longer a transcendence which
transcends me toward himself but a purely contemplated
transcendence, simply a given circuit of selfness. Since I
can not realize both negations at once, the new negation,
although it has the other negation for its motivation, in turn
disguises it. The Other appears to me as a degraded presence.
This is because the Other and I are in fact co-responsible for
the Other’s existence, but it is by two negations such that I
can not experience the one without immediately disguising the
second. Thus the Other becomes now what I limit in my very
projection toward not-being-the-Other.
Naturally it is necessary to realize here that the motiva-
tion of this passage is of the affective order. For example,
nothing would prevent me from remaining fascinated by this
Unrevealed with its beyond if I did not realize this Unrevealed
specifically in fear, in shame, or in pride. It is precisely the
affective character of these motivations which accounts for the
empirical contingency of these changes in point of view. But
these feelings themselves are nothing more than our way of
affectively experiencing our being-for-others. Fear in fact im-
plies that I appear to myself as threatened by virtue of my
being a presence in the world, not in my capacity as a For-it-
self which causes a world to exist. It is the object which / am
which is in danger in the world and which as such, because
of its indissoluble unity of being with the being which I have
to be, can involve in its own ruin the ruin of the For-itself
which I have to be. Fear is therefore the discovery of my
being-as-object on the occasion of the appearance of another
object in my perceptive field. It refers to the origin of all fear,
which is the fearful discovery of my pure and simple object-
state in so far as it is surpassed and transcended by possibles
which are not my possibles. It is by thrusting myself toward
my possibles that I shall escape fear to the extent that I shall
consider my object-ness as non-essential. This can happen
only if I apprehend myself as being responsible for the
Other’s being. The Other becomes then that which 1 make
myself not-be, and his possibilities are possibilities which I
refuse and which I can simply contemplate whence dead-
possibilities. Therefore I surpass my present possibilities
in so far as I consider them as always able to be surpassed
by the Other’s possibilities, but I also surpass the Other’s
possibilities by considering them from the point of view
of the only quality which he has which is not his own
384 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
possibility — ^his very character as Other inasmuch as I cause
there to be an Other. I surpass the Other’s possibilities by
considering them as possibilities of surpassing me which I
can always surpass toward new possibilities. Thus by one and
the same stroke I have regained my being-for-itself through
my consciousness (of) myself as a perpetual center of infinite
possibilities, and I have transformed the Other’s possibilities
into dead-possibilities by affecting them all with the character
of “not-lived-by-me " — that is, as simply given.
Similarly shame is only the original feeling of having my
being outside, engaged in another being and as such without
any defense, illuminated by the absolute light which emanates
from a pure subject. Shame is the consciousness of being
irremediably what I always was: “in' suspense” — ^that is, in
the mode of the “not-yet” or of the “already-^no-longer.” Pure
shame is not a feeling of being this or that guilty object but
in general of being an object; that is, of recognizing myself
in this degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I am for
the Other. Shame is the feeling of an original fall, not be-
cause of the fact that I may have committed this or that
particular fault but simply that I have “fallen” into the world
in the midst of things and that I need the mediation of the
Other in order to be what I am.
Modesty and in particular the fear of being surprised in
a state of nakedness are only a symbolic specification of
original shame; the body symbolizes here our defenseless state
as objects. To put on clothes is to hide one’s object-state; it
is to claim the right of seeing without being seen; that is, to
be pure subject. This is why the Biblical symbol of the fall
after the original sin is the fact that Adam and Eve “know
that they are naked.” The reaction to shame will consist exact-
ly in apprehending as an object the one who apprehended tny
own object-state.
In fact from the moment that the Other appears to me as
an object, his subjectivity becomes a simple property of the
object considered. It is’ degraded and is defined as “an ensem-
ble of objective properties which on principle elude me.” The
Other-as-Object “has” a subjectivity as this hollow box has
an inside.” In this way I recover myself, for I can not be
an object for an object. I certainly do not deny that the Other
remains connected with me “inside him,” but the conscious-
ness which he has of me, since it is consciousness-as-an-
object, appears to me as pure interiority without efficacy. It is
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS 385
just one property among others of that “inside,” something
comparable to a sensitized plate in the closed compartment of
a camera. In so far as I make there be an Other, I apprehend
myself as the free source of the knowledge which the Other
has of me, and the Other appears to me as affected in his
being by that knowledge which he has of my being inasmuch
as I have affected him with the character of Other. This knowl-
edge takes on then a subjective character in the new sense of
“relative”; that is, it remains in the subject-as-object as a
quality relative to the being-other with which I have affected
him. It no longer touches me; it is an image of me in him.
Thus subjectivity is degraded into interiority, free conscious-
ness into a pure absence of principles, possibilities into prop-
erties and the knowledge by which the Other touches me
in my being into a pure image of me in the Other’s “con-
sciousness.” Shame motivates the reaction which surpasses and
overcomes the shame inasmuch as the reaction encloses within
it an implicit and non-thematized comprehension of being-
able-to-be-an-object on the part of the subject for whom I
am an object. This implicit comprehension is nothing other
than the consciousness (of) my “being-myself”; that is, of my
selfness reinforced. In fact in the structure which expresses
the experience “I am ashamed of myself,” shame supposes a
me-as-object for the Other but also a selfness which is
ashamed and which is imperfectly expressed by the “I” of
the formula. Thus shame is a unitary apprehension with three
dimensions: ‘7 am ashamed of myself before the Other.''
If any one of these dimensions disappears, the shame dis-
appears as well. If, however, I conceive of the “they” as a
subject before whom I am ashamed, then it can not become
an object without being scattered into a plurality of Others;
and if I posit it as the absolute unity of the subject which
can in no way become an object, I thereby posit the eternity
of my being-as-object and so perpetuate my shame. This is
shame before God; that is, the recognition of my being-an-
object before a subject which can never become an object. By
the same stroke I realize my object-state in the absolute and
hypostasize it. The position of God is accompanied by a reifi-
cation of my object-ness. Or better yet, I posit my being-an-
object-for-God as more real than my For-itself; I exist alien-
ated and I cause myself to learn from outside what I must be.
This is the origin of fear before God. Black masses, desecra-
tion of the host, demonic associations, etc., are so many at-
386 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
tempts to confer the character of object on the absolute Sub-
ject. In desiring Evil for Evil’s sake I attempt to contemplate
the divine transcendence — ^for which Good is the peculiar
possibility — as a purely given transcendence and one which I
transcend toward Evil. Then I “make God suffer,” I “irritate
him,” etc. These attempts, which imply the absolute recogni-
tion of God as a subject who can not be an object, carry their
own contradiction within them and are always failures.
Pride does not exclude original shame. In fact it is on the
ground of fundamental shame or shame of being an object
that pride is built. It is an ambiguous feeling. In pride I rec-
ognize the Other as the subject through whom my being gets
its object-state, but I recognize as well that I myself am also
responsible for my object-ness. I emphasize my responsibility
and I assume it. In one sense therefore pride is at first res-
ignation; in order to be proud of being that, I must of
necessity first resign myself to being only that. We are there-
fore dealing with a primary reaction to shame, and it is already
a reaction of flight and of bad faith; for without ceasing to
hold the Other as a subject, I try to apprehend myself as
affecting the Other by my object-state. In short there are two
authentic attitudes: that by which I recognize the Other as
the subject through whom I get my object-ness — ^this is shame;
and that by which I apprehend myself as the free object by
which the Other gets his being-other — this is arrogance or the
aflSrmation of my freedom confronting the Other-as-object.
But pride— or vanity — is a feeling without equilibrium, and it
is in bad faith. In vanity I attempt in my capacity as Object to
act upon the Other. I take this beauty or this strength or
this intelligence which he confers on me — in so far as he con-
stitutes me as an object — and I attempt to make use of it in a
return shock so as to affect him passively with a feeling of
admiration or of love. But at the same time I demand that this
feeling as the sanction of my being-as-object should be enter-
tained by the Other in his capacity as subject — i.e., as a free-
dom. This is, in fact, the only way of conferring an absolute
object-ness on my strength or on my beauty. Thus the feeling
which I demand from the other carries within itself its own
contradiction since I must affect the Other with it in so far
as^ he is free. The feeling is entertained in the mode of bad
faith, and its internal development leads it to disintegration.
In fact as I play my assumed role of my being-as-object, I
attempt to recover it as an object. Since the Other is the key
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS 387
to it, I attempt to lay hold of the Other so that he may release
to me the secret of my being. Thus vanity impels me to get
hold of the Other and to constitute him as an object in order
to burrow into the heart of this object to discover there my
own object-state. But this is to kill the hen that lays the
golden eggs. By constituting the Other as object, I con-
stitute myself as an image at the heart of the Other-as-object,
hence the disillusion of vanity. In that image which I
wanted to grasp in order to recover, it and merge it with my
own being, I no longer recognize myself. I must willy-nilly
impute the image to the Other as one of his own subjective
properties. Freed in spite of myself from my object-state, I
remain alone confronting the Other-as-object in my unquali-
fiable self ness which I have to be forever without relief.
Shame, fear, and pride are my original reactions; they are
only various ways by which I recognize the Other as a subject
beyond reach, and they include within them a comprehension
of my selfness which can and must serve as my motivation
for constituting the Other as an object.
This Other-as-object who suddenly appears to me does not
remain a purely objective abstraction. He rises before me with
his particular meanings. He is not only the object which
possesses freedom as a property, as a transcended transcen-
dence. He is also' “angry” or “joyful” or “attentive”; he is
“amiable” or “disagreeable”; he is “greedy,” “quick-tem-
pered,” etc. This is because while apprehending myself as
myself, I make the Other-as-object exist in the midst of the
world. I recognize his transcendence, but I recognize it not as
a transcendence transcending, but as a transcendence tran-
scended. It appears therefore as a surpassing of instruments
toward ends to the exact extent that in my unitary projection
of myself I surpass these ends, these instruments, and the
Other’s surpassing of the instruments, toward ends. This is
because I never apprehend myself abstractly as the pure
possibility of being myself, but I live my selfness in its con-
crete projection toward this or that particular end. I exist only
as engaged^^ and I am conscious (of) being only as engaged.
Thus I apprehend the Other-as-object only in a concrete and
^ Tr. Somewhat unhappily I have decided to use the English words
“engage” and “engagement” for Sartre’s engager and engagement simply
because there is no one English word which conveys all the meaning of
the French. In French engager includes the ideas of “commitment,” of
“involvement," of “immersion,” and even of “entering,” as well as the
English sense of “engagement,”
388
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
engaged surpassing of his transcendence. But conversely the
Other’s engagement, which is his mode of being, appears to
me, in so far as it is transcended by my transcendence, as a
real engagement, as a taking root. In short, so far as I exist
for-myself, my “engagement” in a situation must be under-
stood in the sense in which we say: “I am engaged to a partic-
ular person, I am engaged to return that money,” etc. It is
this engagement which characterizes the Other-as-subject since
he is another self like me. But when I grasp the Other as an
object, his objectivized engagement is degraded and becomes
an engagement-as-object in the sense in which we say, “The
knife is deeply engaged in the wound.” Or, “The army was
engaged in a narrow pass.” It must be understood that the
being-in-the-midst-of-the-world which comes to the Other
through me is a real being. It is not at all a purely subjective
necessity which makes me know him as existing in the midst
of the world. Yet on the other hand the Other did not
by himself lose himself in the world. I make him lose him-
self in the world which is mine by the sole fact that he is
for rne the one who I have to not-be; that is, by the sole
fact that I hold him outside myself as a purely contemplated
reality surpassed^ toward my own ends. Thus objectivity is not
t e pure refraction of the Other across my consciousness; it •
comes through me to the Other as a real qualification: I make
the Other be in the midst of the world.
^erefore what^ I apprehend as real characteristics of the
L ^®^8'in"Situation. In fact I organize him in the
T ^ ''^orld in so far as he organizes the world toward
» apprehend him as the objective unity of instruments
that ^ In Part Two of this work we explained
instruments is the exact correlate of my
poss bilities .^2 Since I am my possibilities, the order of instru-
intn ^ IS the image of my possibilities projected
in-itself; that is, the image of what I am. But this
mundane image I can never decipher; I adapt myself to it in
is action. The Other inasmuch as he is a subject
inVn ^ in his image. On the other hand,
which lean! + ^^^^P i^^ni as object, it is this mundane image
which is ^ Other ^becomes the instrument
is an cirdPT f ^ ^ relation with all other instruments; he
which T - ^ instruments which is included in the order
I impose on these instruments. To apprehend the
Part Two. Chapter Three. Section III.
389
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
Other is to apprehend this enclave-order and to refer it back
^ it is to define this absence
as a fixed flow of the objects of my world toward a definite
object of my universe. And the meaning of this flow is fur-
msh^ to me by those objects themselves. The arrangement of
the harder and nails, of the chisel and marble, the arrange-
ment which I suqjass without being its foundation defines the
meaning of this internal hemorrhage in the world.
Thus the world announces the Other to me in his totality
and as a totality. To be sure, the announcement remains am-
biguous. But this is because I grasp the order of the world to-
ward the Other as an undifferentiated totality on the ground
of which certain explicit structures appear. If I could make
explicit all the instrumental complexes as they are turned to-
ward the Other (that is, if I could grasp not only the place
which the hammer and the nails occupy in this complex of
instrumentality but also the street, the city, the nation, etc.), I
should have defined explicitly and totally the being of the
Other as object. If I am mistaken concerning an intention of
the Other, this is not because I refer his gesture to a sub-
jectivity beyond reach; this subjectivity in itself and by itself
has no common measure with the gesture, for it is transcen-
dence^ for itself, an unsurpassable transcendence. But I
am mistaken because I organize the entire world around this
gesture differently than it is organized in fact. Thus by the
sole fact that the Other appears as object, he is given to me
on principle as a totality; he is extended across the whole
world as a mundane power for the synthetic organization of
this world. I can not make this synthetic organization explicit
any more than I can make the world itself explicit in so far
as it is my world. The difference between the Other-as-subject
— i.e., between the Other such as he is for-hunself — and the
Other-as-object is not a difference between the whole and the
part or between the hidden and the revealed. The Other-as-
object is on principle a whole co-extensive with subjective
totality; nothing is hidden and in so far as objects refer to
other objects, I can increase mdefinitely ray knowledge of the
Other by indefinitely making explicit his relations with other
instruments in the world. The ideal of knowledge of the
Other remains the exhaustive specification of the meaning of
the flow of the world. The difference of principle between
the Other-as-object and the Other-as-subject stems solely from
this fact: that the Other-as-subject can in no way be knowi
390
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
nor even conceived as such. There is no problem of the knowl-
edge of the Other-as-subject, and the objects of the world do
not refer to his subjectivity; they refer only to his object-state
in the world as the meaning — surpassed toward my selfness
— of the intra-mundane flow.
Thus the Other’s presence to me as the one who produces
my object-state is experienced as a subject-totality. If I turn
toward this presence in order to grasp it, I apprehend the
Other once more as totality: an object-totality co-extensive
with the totality of the world. This apprehension is made
all of a sudden; it is from the standpoint of the entire world
that I arrive at the Other-as-object. But it is never anything
but particular relations which come out in relief like figures
on the ground of the world. Around this man whom I do not
know and who is reading in the subway, the entire world is
present. It is not his body only — as an object in the world —
which defines him in his being; it is his identity card, it is the
direction of the particular train which he has boarded, it is
the ring which he wears on his finger. Not as the result of
the signs of what he is — ^this notion of a sign, in fact, would
refer us to a subjectivity which I can not even conceive and
in which he is precisely nothing, strictly speaking, since he
is what he is not and is not what he is — ^but by virtue of real
characteristics of his being. Yet if I know that he is in the
midst of the world, in France, in Paris, in the process of read-
ing; still for lack of seeing his identity card, I can only sup-
pose that he is a foreigner (which means: to suppose that he
is subject to special regulations, that he figures on some official
register, that I must speak to him in Dutch, or in Italian in
order to obtain from him this or that particular gesture, that
the international post directs toward him by this or that route
letters bearing this or that stamp, etc.). Yet this identity card
is on principle given to me in the midst of the world. It does
not escape' me — from the moment that it was created, it has
been set to existing for me. It exists in an implicit state like
each point of the circle which I see as a completed form. And
It would be necessary to change the present totality of my
relations to the world in order to make the identity card
appear as an explicit this on the ground of the universe. In the
same way the anger of the Other-as-object as it is manifested
o me^ across his cries, his stamping, and his threatening ges-
tures IS not the sign of a subjective and hidden anger; it refers
to nothing except to other gestures and to other cries. It
391
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
defines the Other, it is the Other. To be sure, I can be mis-
taken and can take for true anger what is only a pretended
irritation. But it is only in relation to other gestures and to
other objectively apprehensible acts that I can be mistaken.
I am mistaken if I apprehend the motion of his hand as a
real intention to hit me. That is, I am mistaken if I interpret
it as the function of an objectively discernible gesture which
will not take place. In a word the anger objectively appre-
hended is a disposition of the world around an intra-
mundane presence-absence.
Does this mean that we must grant that the Behaviorists
are right? Certainly not. For although the Behaviorists inter-
pret man in terms of his situations, they have lost sight of
his characteristic principle, which is transcendence-tran-
scended. In fact if the Other is the object which can not be
limited to himself, he is also the object which is understood
only in terms of his end. Of course the hammer and the saw
are not understood any differently. Both are apprehended
through their function; that is, through their end. But this is
exactly because they are already human. I can understand
them ohly in so far as they refer me to an instrumental-organi-
zation in which the Other is the center, only in so far as they
form a part of a complex wholly transcended toward an end
which I in turn transcend. If then we can compare the Other
to a machine, this is because the machine as a human fact
presents already the trace of a transcendence-transcended, just
as the looms in a mill are explained only by the fabrics which
they produce. The Behaviorist point of view must be reversed,
and this reversal, moreover, will leave the Other’s objectivity
intact. For that which first of all is objective — ^what we shall
call signification after the fashion of French and English psy-
chologists, intention according to the Phenomenologists, tran-
scendence with Heidegger, or form with the Gestalt school —
this is the fact that the Other can be defined only by a total
organization of the world and that he is the key to this orgard-
zation. If therefore I return from the world to the Other in
order to define him, this is not because the world would make
me understand the Other but because the Other-as-object is
nothing but a center of autonomous and intra-mundane refer-
ence in my world.
Thus the objective fear which we can apprehend when
we perceive the Other-as-object is not the ensemble of the
physiological manifestations of disorder which we see or
392 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
which we measure with sphygmograph or a stethoscope. Fear
i^ a flight; it is a fainting. These phenomena themselves are
not released to us as a pure series of movements but as tran-
scendence-transcended: the flight or the fainting is not only
that desperate running through the brush, nor that heavy
fall on the stones of the road; it is the total upheaval of the
instrumental-organization which had the Other for its cen-
ter. This soldier who is fleeing foririerly had the Other-as-
enemy at the point of his gun. The distance from him to the
enemy was measured by the trajectory of his bullet, and I
too could apprehend and transcend that distance as a dis-
tance organized round the “soldier” as center. But behold
now he throws his gun in the ditch and is trying to save
himself. Immediately the presence of the enemy surrounds
him and presses in upon him; the enemy, who had been
held at a distance by the trajectory of the bullets, leaps upon
him at the very instant when the trajectory collapses; at the
same time that land in the background, which he was defend-
ing and against which he was leaning as against a wall, sud-
denly opens fan-wise and becomes the foreground, the wel-
coming horizon toward which he is fleeing for refuge. All
this I establish objectively, and it is precisely this which I
apprehend as fear. Fear is nothing but a magical conduct
tending by incantation to suppress the frightening objects
which we are unable to keep at a distance.^® It is precisely
through its results that we apprehend fear, for it is given to
us as a new type of internal hemorrhage in the world — ^the
passage from the world to a type of magical existence.
We must be careful however to remember that the Other
is a qualified object for me only to the extent that I can
be one for him. Therefore he will be objectivized as a non-
individualized portion of the “they” or as purely “absent”
represented by his letters and his written accounts of him-
self or as this man present in fact, according to whether
I shall have been myself an element for him of the “they” or
a “dear absent one” or a concrete “this man.” What decides
in each case the type of objectivation of the Other and of his
qualities is both my situation in the world and his situation;
that is, the instrumental complexes which we have each or-
ganized and the various thises which appear to each one of
us on the ground of the world. All this naturally brings us
to facticity. It is my facticity and the Other’s facticity which
“ C/. Esquisse d’une theorie des Emotions. 1939.
393
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
decide whether .the Other can see me and whether I can see
this particular Other. But the problem of facticity is beyond
the scope of this general exposition. We shall consider it in
the course of the next chapter.
Thus I make proof of the Other’s presence as a quasi-total-
ity of subjects in my being-an-object-for-Others, and on the
ground of this totality I can experience more particularly the
presence of a concrete subject without ^however being able
to specify it as that particular Other. My defensive reaction
to my object-state will cause the Other to appear before me
in the capacity of this or that object. As such he will appear
to me as a “this-one”; that is, his subjective quasi-totality is
degraded and becomes a total ity-as-object co-extensive with
the totality of the World. This totality is revealed to me
without reference to the Other’s subjectivity. The relation of
the Other-as-subject to the Other-as-object is in no way
comparable to that which we usually establish, for example,
between the physical object and the object of perception.
The Other-as-object is revealed to me for what he is, he re-
fers only to himself. The Other-as-object is simply such
as he appears to me on the plane of object-ness in general and
in his being-as-object; it is not even conceivable that I should
refer back any knowledge which I have of him to his sub-
jectivity such as I experience it on the occasion of the look.
The Other-as-object is only an object, but my apprehension
of him includes the comprehension of the fact that I could
always and on principle produce from him another ex-
perience by placing myself on another plane of being. This
comprehension is constituted on the one hand by the em-
pirical knowledge of my past experience — ^which is moreover
as we have seen, the pure past (out of reach and what I have
to be) of this experience, and on the other hand it is con-
stituted by an implicit apprehension of the dialectic of the
Other. The Other is at present what I make myself not-be.
But although for the instant I am rid of him and escape him,
there remains around him the permanent possibility that he
may make himself other. Nevertheless this possibility, fore-
seen in the embarrassment and constraint which forms the
specific quality of my attitude confronting the Other-as-object,
is strictly speaking inconceivable: first because I can not con-
ceive of a possibility which is not my possibility nor can^ I
apprehend transcendence except by transcending it — that is,
by grasping it as a transcendence-transcended; secondly be-
394 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
cause this anticipated possibility is not the possibility of the
Other-as-object— the possibilities of the Other-as-object are
dead-possibilities which refer to other objective aspects of
the Other. The peculiar possibility of apprehending myself
as an object is the possibility belonging to the Other-as-subject
and hence is not for me a living possibility; it is an ab-
solute possibility — ^which derives its source only from itself
— that on the ground of the total annihilation of the
Other-as-object, there may occur the upsurge of an Other-as-
subject which I shall experience across my objectivity-for-him.
Thus the Other-as-object is an explosive instrument which
I handle with care because I foresee around him the perma-
nent possibility that they are going to make it explode and
that with this explosion I shall suddenly experience the
flight of the world away from me and the alienation of my
being. Therefore my constant concern is to contain the Other
within his objectivity, and my relations with the Other-as-
object are essentially made up of ruses designed to make him
remain an object. But one look on the part of the Other is
sufficient to make all these schemes collapse and to make me
experience once more the transfiguration of the Other. Thus
I am referred from transfiguration to degradation and from
degradation to transfiguration without ever being able
either to get a total view of the ensemble of these two modes
of being on the part of the Other — ^for each of them is self-
sufficient and refers only to itself — or to hold firmly to either
one of them — ^for each has its own instability and collapses
in order for the other to rise from its ruins. Only the dead
can be perpetually objects without ever becoming subjects —
for to die is not to lose one’s objectivity in the midst of the
world; all the dead are there in the world around us. But to
die is to lose all possibility of revealing oneself as subject
to an Other.
At this point in our investigation now we have elucidated
the essential structures of being-for-others, there is an obvious
temptation to raise the metaphysical question: “Why are
there Others?” As we have seen, the existence of Others is
not a consequence which can derive from the ontological
structure of the for-itself. It is a primary event, to be sure,
but of a metaphysical order; that is, it results from the con-
tingency of being. The question “why” is essentially con-
nected with these metaphysical existences.
We know vety well that the answer to the “why” can only
395
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
refer us to an original contingency, but still it is necessary
to prove that the metaphysical phenomenon which we are
considering is an irreducible contingency. In this sense ontol-
ogy appears to us capable of being defined as the specifica-
tion of the structures of being of the existent taken as a to-
tality, and- we shall define metaphysics rather as raising the
question of the existence of the existent. This is why in
view of the absolute contingency of the existent, we are con-
vinced that any metaphysics must conclude with a “that is” —
i.e., in a direct intuition 'of that contingency.
Is it possible to posit the question of the existence of
Others? Is this existence an irreducible fact, or is it to be
derived from a fundamental contingency? Such are the pre-
liminary questions which we can in turn pose to the metaphy-
sician who questions us concerning the existence of Others.
Let us examine more closely the possibility of the meta-
physical question. What appears to us first is the fact that the
being-for-others represents the third ekstasis of the for-itself.
The first ekstasis is indeed the tridimensional projection on
the part of the for-itself toward a being which it has to be
in the mode of non-being. It represents the first fissure, the
nihilation which the for-itself has to be, the wrenching away
on the part of the for-itself from everything which it is, and
this wrenching away is constitutive of its being. The second
ekstasis or reflective ekstasis is the wrenching away from
this very wrenching away. The reflective scissiparity corre-
sponds to a vain attempt to take a point of view on the
nihilation which the for-itself has to be, in order that this
nihilation as a simply given phenomenon may be a nihi-
lation which is. But at the same time reflection wants to re-
cover this wrenching away, which it attempts to contem-
plate as a pure given, by affirming concerning itself that
it is this nihilation which is. This is a flagrant contradiction:
in order to be able to apprehend my transcendence, I should
have to transcend it. But my own transcendence can only
transcend. I am my own transcendence; I can not make
use of it so as to constitute it as a transcendence-transcended.
I am condemned to be forever my own nihilation. In short
reflection (reflexion) is the reflected-on.
The reflective nihilation, however, is pushed further than
that of the pure for-itself as a simple self-consciousness. In
self-consciousness, in fact, the two terms of the dyad “reflect-
ed-reflecting” (reflet e-re fletant) were so incapable of present-
396 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ing themselves separately that the duality remained perpetually
evanescent and each term while positing itself for the other
became the other. But with reflection, the case is different
since the “reflection-reflecting” which is reflected-on exists
for a “reflection-reflecting” which is reflective. Reflected-on
and reflective, therefore, each tend toward independence, and
the nothing which separates them tends to divide &ein
more profoundly than the nothingness which the For-itself
has to be separates the reflection from the reflecting. Yet
neither the reflective nor the reflected-on can secrete this
separating nothingness, for in that case reflection (reflexion)
would be an autonomous for-itself coming to direct itself on
the reflected-on which would be to suppose an external ne-
gation as the preliminary condition of an internal negation.
There can be no reflection if it is not entirely a being, a
being which has to be its own nothingness.
Thus the reflective ekstasis is found on the path to a more
radical ekstasis — ^the being-for-others. The final term of the
nihilation, the ideal pole should be in fact the external ne-
gation — ^that is, a scissiparity in-itself or the spatial exterior-
ity of indifference. In relation to this external negation the
three ekstases are ranked in the order which we have just
presented, but the goal is never achieved. It remains on
principle ideal; in fact the for-itself — without running the
risk of ceasing by the same stroke to be-for-itself — can not by
itself realize in relation to any being a negation which would
be in-itself. The constitutive negation of being-for-others is
therefore an internal negation; it is a nihilation which the
for-itself has to be, just like the reflective nihilation. But here
the scissiparity attacks the very negation; it is no longer only
the negation which divides being into reflected and reflecting
and in turn divides the dyad refiected-reflecting into (reflect-
ed-reflecting) reflected and (refiected-reflecting) reflecting.
Here the negation is divided into two internal and opposed
negations; each is an internal negation, but they are never-
theless separated from one another by an inapprehensible
external nothingness. In fact since each of them is exhausted
in denying that one for-itself is the other and since each n^
gation is wholly engaged in that being which it has to be, it
is no longer in command of itself so as to deny concerning
itself that it is the opposite negation. Here suddenly appears
the' given, not as the result of an identity of being-in-itself
but as a sort of phantom of exteriority which neither of the
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
397
negations has to be and which yet separates them. Actually
in the reflective being we have already found the beginning
of this negative inversion. In fact the reflective as a witness
is profoundly affected in its being by its reflectivity, and con-
sequently in so far as it makes itself reflective, it aims at not
being the reflected-on. But reciprocally the reflected-on is
^elf-consciousness as the reflected-on consciousness of this or
that transcendent phenomenon. We said of it that it knows
itself looked-at. In this sense it aims on its part at not-
being the reflective since every consciousness is defined by
its negativity. But this tendency to a double schism was re-
covered and stifled by the fact that in spite of everything
the reflective had to be the reflected-on and that the reflected-
on had to be the reflective. The double negation remained
evanescent.'
In the case of the third ekstasis we behold a reflective
scissiparity pushed further. The results may surprise us: on
the one hand, since the negations are effected in interiority,
the Other and myself can not come to one another from the
outside. It is necessary that there be a being “I-and-the-Other”
which has to be the reciprocal scissiparity of the for-others
just as the totality “reflective-reflected-on” is a being which
has to be its own nothingness; that is, my self ness and that
of the Other are structures of one and the same totality of
being. Thus Hegel appears to be right: the point of view
of the totality is the point of view of being, the true point
of view. Everything happens as if my self ness confront-
ing that of the Other were produced and maintained by a
totality which would push its own nihilation to the extreme;
being-for-others appears to be the prolongation of the pure
reflective scissiparity. In this sense everything happens as
if the Other and myself indicated the vain effort of a total-
ity of for-itself to reapprehend itself and to envelop what
it has to be in the pure and simple mode of the in-itself.
This effort to reapprehend itself as object is pushed here to
the limit— that is, well beyond the reflective division —
and would produce a result precisely the reverse of the end
toward which this totality would project itself. By its effort
to be self-consciousness the totality-for-itself would be con-
stituted in the face of the self as a self-as-consciousness
which has to not-be the self of which it is consciousness. Con-
versely the self-as-object in order to be would have to experi-
ence itself as made-to-be by and for a consciousness which
398 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
it has to not-be if it wishes to be. Thus would be bora
L schism of the for-others, and this dichotomic division
wild be repeated to infinity in order to constitute a plural-
ity of consciousnesses as fragments of a radical explosion,
“^ere would be” numerous Others as the Jesuit of
a faUure the reverse of the reflective failure. In reflection m
fact if I do not succeed in apprehendmg myself as an object
but only as a quasi-object, tliis is because I am the object
which I wish to grasp; I have to be the
separates me from myself. I can escape my selfness nei&er
by taking a point of view on myself (for thus I do not su -
ceed in realizing myself as being) nor by apprehendmg my-
self in the form of the “there is” (here the recovery fails be-
cause the recoverer is to himself the recovered). In the case
of being-for-others, on the contrary, the scissiparity is pus e
further; the (reflection-reflecting) reflected is radically dis-
tinct from the (reflection-reflecting) reflecting and ^eby
can be an object for it. But this time the recovery fads be-
cause the recovered is not the one recovering. Thus me o
tality which is not what it is but which is what it is not,
would— as the result of a radical attempt at wrenchmg away
from self — everywhere produce its being as an “elsewhere.
The scattering of being-in-itself of a shattered totality, always
elsewhere, always at a distance, never in itself, but always
maintained in being by the perpetual explosion of this to i y
— such would be the being of others and of myself as other.
But on the other hand, simultaneously with my negation
of myself, the Other denies concerning himself that he is
me. These two negations are equally indispensable to being
for-others, and they can not be reunited by , any synthesis.
This is not because an external nothingness would have sep
arated them at the start but rather because the in-itself wo
recapture each one in relation to the other by the mere
that each one is not the other without having to not-be m€
other. There is here a kind of limit of the for-itself whic
stems from the for-itself itself but which qua l^t ^ inde-
pendent of the for-itself. We rediscover something like /flo-
ticity and we can not conceive how the totality of which w«
were speaking earlier would have been able at the very hear
of the most radical wrenching away to produce in its beinj
a nothingness which it in no way has to be. In fact it seem,
that this nothingness has slipped into this totality in ordei
to shatter it just as in the atomism of Leucippus non-bemj
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHERS
399
slips into the Parmenidean totality of being and makes it
explode into atoms. Therefore it represents the negation of
any synthetic totality in terms of which one might claim to
understand the plurality of consciousnesses. Of course it is
inapprehensible since it is produced neither by the Other
nor by myself, nor by any intermediary, for we have estab-
lished that consciousnesses experience one another without
intermediary. Of course where we directed our sight, we en-
countered as the object of our description only a pure and
simple internal negation. Yet it is there in the irreducible
fact that there is a duality of negations. It is not, to be sure,
the foundation of the multiplicity of consciousnesses, for if
it existed before this multiplicity, it would make all being-
for others impossible. On the contrary, we must conceive of
it as the expression of this multiplicity; it appears with this
multiplicity. But since there is nothing which can found it,
neither a particular consciousness nor a totality exploding
into consciousnesses, it appears as a pure, irreducible con-
tingency. It is the fact that my denial that I am the Other is
not sufficient to make the Other exist, but that the Other
must simultaneously with my own negation deny that he is
me. This is the facticity of being-for-others.
Thus we arrive at this contradictory conclusion: being-for-
others can be only if it is made-to-be by a totality which is
lost so that being-for-others may arise, a position which
would lead us to postulate the existence and directing power
of the mind. But on the other hand, tliis being-for-others
can exist only if it involves an inapprehensible and external
non-being wMch no totality, not even the mind, can pro-
duce or found. In one sense the existence of a plurality of
consciousnesses can not be a primary fact and it refers us to
an original fact of a wrenching away from self, a fact of the
mind. Thus the question “Why is there a plurality of con-
sciousnesses?” could receive an answer. But in another sense
the facticity of this plurality seems to be irreducible; and if
the mind is considered from the standpoint of the fact of
the plurality, it vanishes. Then the metaphysical question
no longer has meaning; we have encountered a fundamental
contingency, and we can answer only by “So it is.” Thus
the original ekstasis is deepened; it appears that we can not
make it a part of nothingness. The for-itself has appeared
to us as a being which exists in so far as it is not what it
is and is what it is not. The ekstatic totality of the mind is
400
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
not simply a totality detotalized; it appears to us as a shat-
tered being concerning which we can neither say that it ex-
ists nor that it does not exist. Thus our description has en-
abled us to satisfy the preliminary conditions which we have
posited for any theory about the existence of the Other.
The multiplicity of consciousnesses appears to us as a syn-
thesis and not as a collection, but it is a synthesis whose
totality is inconceivable.
Is this to say that the antinomic character of the totality
is itself an irreducible? Or from a higher point of view can
we make it disappear? Ought we to posit that the mind is
the being which is and is not just as we posited that the for-
itself is what it is not and is not what it is? The question
has no meaning. It is supposing that it is possible for us to
take a point of view on the totality; that is, to consider it
from outside. But this is impossible precisely because I exist
as nayself on the foundation of this totality and to the ex-
tent ^that I am engaged in it. No consciousness, not even
God s, can see the underside” — -that is, apprehend the to-
tality as such. For if God is consciousness, he is integrated
m the totality. And if by his nature, he is a being beyond
consciousness (that is, an in-itself which would be its own
foundation) still the totality can appear to him only as ob-
ject (in that case he lacks the totality’s internal disintegra-
tion as the subjective effort to reapprehend the self) or as
su ject (then since God is not this subject, he can only ex-
perience it without knowing it). Thus no point of view on
me totality is conceivable; the totality has no “outside,” and
me very question of the meaning of the “underside” is
striped of meaning. We can not go further.
we have arrived at the end of this exposition. We
®^rned that me Other’s existence -was experienced with
vidence in and through me fact of my objectivity. We
^ reaction to my own alienation for me
Tn ™ grasping the Other as an object.
Deripnr-p’ r,- ^^^st for us in two forms: if I ex-
him evidence, I fail to know him; if I know
his TirnK M ^ reach his being-as-object and
mesfs of existence in me midst of the world. No syn-
here Thic two forms is possible. But we can not stop
which T a ° which the Other is for me and this object
men k mv manifested each as a body. What
men is my body? What is me body of me Omer?
CHAPTER TWO
The Body
The problem of the body and its relations with consciousness
is often obscured by the fact that while the body is from the
start posited as a certain thing having its own laws and
capable of being defined from outside, consciousness is then
reached by the type of inner intuition which is peculiar to it.
Actually if after grasping “my” consciousness in its absolute
interiority and by a series of reflective acts, I then seek to
unite it with a certain living object composed of a nervous
system, a brain, glands, digestive, respiratory, and circulatory
organs whose very matter is capable of being analyzed chem-
ically into atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus,
etc., then I am going to encounter insurmountable difficul-
ties. But these difficulties all stem from the fact that I try to
unite my consciousness not with my body but with the body
of others. In fact the body which I have just described is not
my body such as it is for me. I have never seen and never
shall see my brain nor my endocrine glands. But because I who
am a man have seen the cadavers of men dissected, because I
have read articles on* physiology, I conclude that my body is
constituted exactly like all those which have been shown to
me on the dissection table or of which I have seen colored
drawings in books. Of course the physicians who have taken
care of me, the surgeons who have operated on me, have been
able to have direct experience with the body which I myself
do not know. I do not disagree with them, I do not claim
401
402 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
that I lack a brain, a heart, or a stomach. But it is most impor-
tant to choose the order of our bits of knowledge. So far as
the physicians have had any experience with my body, it was
with my body in the midst of the world and as it is for others.
My body as it is for me does not appear to me in the midst
of the world. Of course during a radioscopy I was able to see
the picture of my vertebrae on a screen, but I was outside in
the midst of the world. I was apprehending a wholly consti-
tuted object as a this among other thises, and it was only by a
reasoning process that I referred it back to being mine; it was
much more my property than my being.
It is true that I see and touch my legs and my hands.
Moreover nothing prevents me from imagining an arrange-
ment of the sense organs such that a living being could see
one of his eyes while the eye which was seen was directing
its glance upon the world. But it is to be noted that in this
case again I am the Other in relation to my eye. 1 apprehend
it as a sense organ constituted in the world in a particular
way, but I can not “see the seeing”; that is, I can not appre-
hend it in the process of revealing an aspect of the world to
me. Either it is a thing among other things, or else it is that
by which things are revealed to me. But it can not be both at
the same time. Similarly I see my hand touching objects, but
do not know it in its act of touching them. This is the funda-
mental reason why that famous “sensation of effort” of
Maine de Biran does not really exist. For my hand reveals to
me the resistance of objects, their hardness or softness, but
not itself. Thus I see my hand only in the way that I see this
inkwell. I unfold a distance between it and me, and this dis-
tance comes to integrate itself in the distances which I estab-
lish among all the objects of the world. When a doctor takes
my wounded leg and looks at it while I, half raised up on my
bed, watch him do it, there is no essential difference between
the visual perception which I have of the doctor’s body and
that which I have of my own leg. Better yet, they are dis-
tinguished only as different structures of a single global
perception; there is no essential difference between the doc-
of my leg and my own present perception of
Uf course "when I touch my leg with my finger, I realize
at my leg is touched. But this phenomenon of double sensa-
on IS not essential: cold, a shot of morphine, can make it
isappe^. This shows that we are dealing with two essen-
tially different orders of reality. To touch and to be touched.
THE BODY
403
to feel that one is touching and to feel that one is touched
— these are two species of phenomena which it is useless to
try to reunite by the term “double sensation.” In fact they
are radically distinct, and they exist on two incommunicable
levels. Moreover when I touch my leg or when I see it, I sur-
pass it toward my own possibilities. It is, for example, in
order to pull on my trousers or to change a dressing on my
wound. Of course I can at the same time arrange my leg in
such a way that I can more conveniently “work” on it. But
this does' not change the fact that I transcend it toward the
pure possibility of “curing myself” and that consequently I
am present to it without its being me and without my being it.
What I cause to exist here is the thing “leg”; it is not the
leg as the possibility which I am of walking, running, or of
playing football.
Thus to the extent that my body indicates my possibili-
ties in the world, seeing my body or touching it is to trans-
form these possibilities of mine into dead-possibilities. This
metamorphosis must necessarily involve a complete thisness
with regard to the body as a living possibility of running, of
dancing, etc. Of course, the discovery of my body as an object
is indeed a revelation of its being. But &e being which is
thus revealed to me is its being-for-others. That this confu-
sion may lead to absurdities can be clearly seen in connection
with the famous problem of “inverted vision.” We know the
question posed by the physiologists: “How can we set up-
right the objects which are painted upside down on our
retina?” We know as well the answer of the philosophers:
“There is no problem. An object is upright or inverted in rela-
hon to the rest of the universe. To perceive the whole universe
inverted means nothing, for it would have to be inverted in
relation to something,” But what particularly interests us is
the origin of this false problem. It is the fact that people have
wanted to link my consciousness of objects to the body of the
Other. Here are the candle, the crystalline lens, the inverted
unage on the screen of the retina. But to be exact, the retina
enters here into a physical system; it is a screen and only that;
the crystalline lens is a lens and only a lens; both are homo-
geneous in their being with the candle which completes the
system. Therefore we have deliberately chosen the physical
pomt of view — i.e., the point of view of the outside, of ex-
eriority ^in order to study the problem of vision; we have
considered a dead eye in the midst of the visible world in
404
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
order to account for the visibility of this world. Con-
sequently, how can we be surprised later when conscious-
ness, which is absolute interiority, refuses to allow itself to
be bound to this object? The relations which I establish be-
tween the Other’s body and the external object are really
existing relations, but they have for their being the being of
the for-others; they suppose a center of inlra-mundane flow in
which knowledge is a magic property of space, “action at a
distance.” From the start they are placed in the perspective
of the Other-aS'Object.
If then we wish to reflect on the nature of the body, it is
necessary to establish an order of our reflections which con-
forms to the order of being: we can not continue to confuse
the ontological levels, and we must in succession examine the
body first as being-for-itself and then as being-for-others. And
in order to avoid such absurdities as “inverted vision,” we
must keep constantly in mind the idea that since these two
aspects of the body are on different and incommunicable levels
of being, they can not be reduced to one another. Being-for-
itself must be wholly body and it must be wholly conscious-
n^s; it^ can not be united with a body. SimUarly being-for-
mers IS wholly body; there are no “psychic phenomena”
thermo be united with the body. There is nothing behind
the body. But the body is wholly “psychic.” We must now
^oceed to study these two modes of being which we find for
the body.
I. THE BODY AS BEING-FOR-ITSELF:
FACTICITY
It appears at first glance that the preceding observations are
opposed to the givens of the Cartesian cogito. “The soul is
know than the body,” said Descartes. Thereby he
^ radical distinction between the facts of
nf ^ accessible to reflection, and the facts
diVino knowledge of which must be guaranteed by
itc oTii L appears at first that reflection reveals to
^ facts of consciousness. Of course on this level
thf>Tnco,T°^” phenomena which appear to include within
the tinrnmf With the body: “physical” pain,
less mvr ^ pleasure, etc. But these phenomena are no ,
less pure facts of consciousness. There is a tendency therefore
THE BODY
405
to. make signs out of them, ajffections of consciousness
occasioned by the body, without realizing that one has thereby
irremediably driven the body out of consciousness and that no
bond will ever be able to reunite this body, which is already a
body-for-others, with the consciousness which, it is claimed,
makes the body manifest.
Furthermore we ought not to take this as our point of
departure but rather our primary relation to the in-itself: our
being-in-the-world. We know that there is not a for-itself on
the one hand and a world on the other as two closed entities
for which we must subsequently seek some explanation as to
how they communicate. The for-itself is a relation to the
I world. The for-itself, by denying that it is being, makes there
be a world, and by surpassing this negation toward its own
possibilities it reveals the “thises” as instrumental-things.
But when we say that the for-itself is-in-the-world, that
consciousness is consciousness of the world, we must be care-
ful to remember that the world exists confronting conscious-
ness as an indefinite multiplicity of reciprocal relations which
consciousness surveys without perspective and contemplates
without a point of view. For me, this glass is to the left of
the decanter and a little behind it; for Pierre, it is to the
right and a little in front. It is not even conceivable that a
consciousness could survey the world in such a way that the
glass should be simultaneously given to it at the right and at
the left of the decanter, in front of it and behind it. This is
by no means the consequence of a strict application of the
principle of identity but because this fusion of right and left,
of before and behind, would result in the total disappearance
of '^thises” at the heart of a primitive indistinction. Similarly
if the table leg hides the designs in the rug from my sight,
this is not the result of some finitude and some imperfection
in ny visual organs, but it is because a rug which would not
be hidden by the table, a rug which would not be either under
It or above it or to one side of it, would not have any relation
^ any kind with the table and would no longer belong to
the “world”, in which there is the table. The in-itself which
IS made manifest in the form of the this would return to its
indifferent self-identity. Even space as a purely external rela-
tion would disappear. The constitution of space as a multi-
plicity of reciprocal relations can be effected only from the
abstract point of view of science; it can not be lived, it can
not even be represented. The triangle which I trace on the
406
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
blackboard so as to help me in abstract reasoning is necessarily
to the right of the circle tangent to one of its sides, necessarily
to the extent that it is on the blackboard. And my effort is to
surpass the concrete characteristics of the figure traced in
chalk by not including its relation to me in my calculations
any more than the thickness of the lines or the imperfection of
the drawing.
Thus by the mere fact that there is a world, this world
can not exist without a univocal orientation in relation to me.
Idealism has rightly insisted on the fact that relation makes
the world. But since idealism took its position on the ground
of Newtonian science, it conceived this relation as a relation
of reciprocity. Thus it attained only abstract concepts of pure
exteriority, of action and reaction, etc., and due to this very
fact it missed the world and succeeded only in making ex-
plicit the limiting concept of absolute objectivity. This con-
cept in short amounted to that of a “desert worleT' or of “a
world without men”; that is, to a contradiction, since it is
through hurtian reality that there is a world. Thus the concept
of objectivity, which aimed at replacing the in-itself of'dog-
matic truth by a pure relation of reciprocal agreement between
representations, is self-destructive if pushed to the limit.
Moreover the progress of science has led to rejecting
this notion of absolute objectivity. What Broglie is led to call
experience” is a system of 'univocal relations from which the
observer is not excluded. If microphysics can reintegrate the
observer into the heart of the scientific system, this is not by
virtue of pure subjectivity — this notion would have no
more meaning than that of pure' objectivity — but as an orig-
inal relation to the world, as a place, as that toward which
all envisaged relations are oriented. Tius, for example, Hei-
sen erg s principle of indeterminacy can hot be considered
eit er as an invalidation or a validation of the determinist
postulate. Instead of (being a pure connection between things,
1 includes within itself the original relation of man to
place in the world. This is sufficiently demon-
ra ed, for example, by the fact that we cannot make the
imensions of bodies in motion increase in proportionate
without changing their relative speed. If I examine
eve toward another first with the naked
hundred ^ '"^'^roscope, it will appear to me a
body in mntinn second case; for although the
on approaches no closer to the body toward
THE BODY
407
which it is moving, it has in the same time traversed a space
a hundred times as large. Thus the notion of speed no longer
means an5dhing unless it is speed in relation to given dimen-
sions of a body in motion. But it is we ourselves who decide
these dimensions by our very upsurge into the world and it is
very necessary that we decide them, for otherwise they would
not be at all. Thus they are relative not to the knowledge
which we get of- them but to our primary engagement at the
heart of the world.
This fact is expressed perfectly by the theory of relativity:
an observer placed at the heart of a system can not determine
by any experiment whether the system is at rest or in mo-
tion. But this relativity is not a “relativism”; it has nothing to
do with knowledge; better yet, it implies the dogmatic postu-
late according to which knowledge releases to us what is. The
relativity of modern science aims at being. Man and the
world are relative beings, and the principle of their being is
the relation. It follows that the first relation proceeds from
human-reality to the world. To come into existence, for me, is
to unfold my distances from things and thereby to cause
things “to be there.” But consequently things are precisely
“things-which-exist-at-a-distance-from-me.” Thus the world
refers to me that univocal relation which is my being and by
which I cause it to be revealed.
The point of yiew of pure knowledge is contradictory; there
is only the point of view of engaged knowledge. This amounts
to saying that knowledge and action are only two abstract
aspects of an original, concrete relation. The real space of the
world is the space which Lewin calls “hodological.” A pure
knowledge in fact would be a knowledge without a point of
view; therefore a knowledge of the world but on principle
located outside the world. But this makes no sense; the know-
ing being would be only knowledge since he would be defined
by his object and since his object would disappear in the total
indistinction of reciprocal relations. Thus knowledge can be
only an engaged upsurge in a determined point of view which
one is. For human reality, to be is to-be-there; that is, “there
in that chair,” “there at that table,” “there at the top of that
mountain, with these dimensions, this orientation, etc" It is
an ontological necessity.
This point must be well understood. For this necessity ap-
pears between two contingencies: on the one hand, while it
is necessary that I be in the form of being-there, still it is
408
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
altogether contingent that I be, for I am not the foundation of
my being; on the other hand, while it is necessary that I be
engaged in this or that point of view, it is contingent that it
should be precisely in this view to the exclusion of all others.
This twofold contingency which embraces a necessity we have
called the facticity of the for-itsclf. We have described it in
Part Two. We showed there that the nihilated in-itself,
engulfed in the absolute event which is the appearance of the
foundation or the upsurge of the for-itself, remains at the
heart of the for-itself as its original contingency. Thus the for-
itself is supported by a perpetual contingency for which it be-
comes responsible and which it assimilates without ever being
able to suppress it. Nowhere can the for-itsclf find this con-
tingency anywhere within itself; nor can the for-itself any-
where apprehend and know it — not even by the reflective
cogito. The for-itself forever surpasses this contingency to-
ward its own possibilities, and it encounters in itself only the
nothingness which it has to be. Yet facticity does not cease to
haunt the for-itself, and it is facticity which causes me to
apprehend myself simultaneously as totally responsible for my
being and as totally unjustifiable.
, world refers to me the image of this unjustifi-
ability m the forrn of the synthetic unity of its univocal re-
lations to me. It is absolutely necessary that the world ap-
pear to me in order . And in this sense this order is me; it is
mat image of me which we described in the last chapter of
Fart Two. But it is wholly contingent that it should be this
appears as the necessary and totally unjustifi-
able arrangement of the totality of being. This absolutely
necessary and totally unjustifiable order of the things of the
wor , this order which is myself in so far as I am neither
e oundation of my being nor the foundation of a par-
order is the body as it is on the level of
me ror-itselt. In this sense we could define the body as the
con nxgenf /omi which is assumed by the necessity of my
. T^e body is nothing other than the for-itself;
ib-itself in the for-itself, for in that case it would
^ But it is the fact that the for-itself is not
«!ifv 9^pdation, and this fact is expressed by the neces-
engaged, contingent being among other
situation nf distinct from the
to be sifiint ^ for-itself since for the for-itself, to exist and
e are one and the same; on the other hand the
THE BODY
409
body is identified with the whole world inasmuch as the
world is the total situation of the for-itself and the measure
of its existence.
But a situation is not a pure contingent given. Quite the
contrary, it is revealed only to the extent that the for-itself
surpasses it toward itself. Consequently the body-for-itself is
never a given which I can know. It is there everywhere as
the surpassed; it exists only in so far as I escape it by nihilat-
ing myself. The body is what I nihilate. It is the in-itself
which is surpassed by the nihilating for-itself and which re-
apprehends the for-itself in this very surpassing. It is the
fact that I am my own motivation without being my own
foundation, the fact that I am nothing without having to be
what I am and yet in so far as I have to be what I am, I
am without having to be. In one sense therefore the body is
a necessary characteristic of the for-itself; it is not true that
the body is the product of an arbitrary decision on the part
of a demiurge nor that the union of soul and body is the
contingent bringing together of two substances radically dis-
tinct. On the contrary, the very nature of the for-itself de-
mands that it be body; that is, that its nihilating escape from
being should be made in the form of an engagement in the
world. Yet in another sense the body manifests my contin-
gency; we can even say that it is only this contingency. The
Ca^rtesian rationalists were right in being struck with this
characteristic; in fact it represents the individualization of
my engagement in the world. And Plato was not wrong ei-
ther in taking the body as that which individualizes the soul.
Yet it would be in vain to suppose that the soul can detach
itself from this individualization by separating itself from
the body at death or by pure thought, for the soul is the
body inasmuch as the for-itself is its own individualization.
We shall understand the bearing of these remarks better
if we try to apply them to the problem of sense knowledge.
The problem of sense knowledge is raised on the occasion
of the appearance in the midst of the world of certain ob-
jects which we call the senses. First we established that the
Other had eyes; later as physiologists dissected cadavers, they
learned the structure of these objects; they distinguished the
cornea from the crystalline lens and the lens from the retina.
They established that the object, crystalline lens, was classed
in a family of particular objects — ^lenses — and that they could
apply to the object of their study those laws of geometric
410
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
optics which concern lenses. More precise dissections effected
progressively as surgical instruments were perfected, have
taught us that a bundle of nerves leave the retina and end
up in the brain. With the microscope we have examined the
nerves of cadavers and have determined exactly their trajec-
tory, their point of departure, and their point of arrival.
The totality of these pieces of knowledge concerned there-
fore a certain spatial object called the eye; they implied the
existence of space and of the world. In addition they im-
plied that we could see this eye, and touch it; that is, we are
ourselves provided with a sensible point of view on things.
Finally between our knowledge of the eye and the eye itself
are interposed all our technical knowledge (the art of mak-
ing our scalpels, our lancets) and our scientific skills (e.g.,
geometric optics, which enables us to construct and use mi-
croscopes). In short, between me and the eye which I dissect
there is interposed the whole world such as I make it appear
by my very upsurge. Later a more thorough examination has
enabled us to establish the existence of various nerve end-
ings on the surface of our body. We have even succeeded in
acting separately on certain of these endings and performing
experiments on living subjects. We then found ourselves in
the presence of two objects in the world: on the one hand
the stimulant; on the other hand the sensitive cell or the
free nerve ending which we stimulated. The stimulant was
a physical-chemical object, an electric current, a mechanical
or chemical agent whose properties we knew with precision
an which we could vary in intensity or in duration in a
e nite way. Therefore we were dealing with two mundane
r their intra-mundane relation could be estab-
is e y our own senses or by means of instruments. The
now edge of this relation once again supposed a whole sys-
em o scientific and technical skills, in short, the existence
^ original upsurge into the world. Our em-
£.1 ormation enabled us, furthermore, to conceive a
inside” of the Other-as-object and the
fnrt ^ these objective establishments. We learned in
certain senses we “provoked a modifi-
innn ^ Others consciousness. We learned this through
„ through the meaningful and objective
nhvsioi^^ ^ Physical object (the stimulant), a
object (sense), a psychic object (the Other),
x ^ estations ofv meaning (language) : , such are
THE BODY
411
the terms of the objective relation which we wished to es-
tablish. But not one of them could enable us to get out of
the world of objects.
On occasion I have served as subject for the research work
of physiologists or psychologists. K I volunteered for some
experiment of this kind, I found myself suddenly in a lab-
oratory where I perceived a more or less illuminated screen,
or else felt tiny electric shocks, or I was brushed by an ob-
ject which I could not exactly determine but whose global
presence I grasped as in the midst of the world and over
against me. Not for an instant was I isolated from the world;
all these events happened for me in a laboratory in the mid-
dle of Paris, in the south building of the Sorbonne. I re-
mained in the Other’s presence, and the very meaning of
the experiment demanded that I could communicate with
him through language. From time to time the experimenter
asked me if the screen appeared to me more or less illumi-
nated, if the pressure exerted on my hand seemed to me
stronger or weaker, and I replied; that is, I gave objective
information concerning things which appeared in the midst
of my world. Sometimes an inept experimenter asked me if
“my sensation of light was stronger or weaker, more or less
intense.” Since I was in the midst of objects and in the
process of observing these objects, his phrase would have
had no meaning for me if I had not long since learned to
use the expression “sensation of light” for objective light as
it appeared to me in the world at a given instant. I replied
therefore that the sensation of light was, for example, less
intense, but I meant by this that the screen was in my opin-
ion less illuminated. Since I actually apprehended the screen
as less illuminated, the phrase “in my opinion” correspond-
ed to nothing real except to an attempt not to confuse the
objectivity of the world-for-me with a stricter objectivity,
which is the result of experimental measures and of the
agreement of minds with each other. What I could know in
each case was a certain object which die experimenter ob-
served during this time and which was my visual organ or
certain tactile endings. Therefore the result obtained at the
end of the experiment could be only the relating of two
series of objects: those which were revealed to me during
the experiment and those which were revealed during the
same period to the experimenter. The illumination of the
screen belonged to my world; my eyes as objective organs
412
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
/
belonged to the world of the experimenter. The connection
of these two series was held to be like a bridge between two
worlds; under no circumstances could it be a table of correla-
tion between the subjective and the objective.
Why indeed should we use the term “subjectivity” for the
ensemble of luminous or heavy or odorous objects such as
they appeared to me in this laboratory at Paris on a day in
February, etc? And if despite all we are to consider this en-
semble as subjective, then why should we recognize objec-
tivity in the system of objects which were revealed simulta-
neously to the experimenter, in this laboratory, this same
day in February? We do not have two weights or two mea-
sures here; we do not encounter anywhere anything which is
given as purely felt, as experienced for me without objecti-
vation. Here as always I am conscious of the world, and on
the ground of the world I am conscious of certain tran-
scendent objects. As always I surpass what is revealed to me
toward the possibility which I have to be — for example, to-
ward that of replying correctly to the experimenter and of
enabling the experiment to succeed. Of course these com-
parisons can give certain objective results: for example, I
can establish that the warm water appears cold to me when
I put my hand in it after having first plunged my hand in
hot water. But this establishment which we pompously call
the law of relativity of sensations” has nothing to do with
s^sations. Actually we are dealing with a quality of the
object which is revealed to me: the warm water is cold when
^ submerge my heated hand in it. A comparison of this ob-
jertxw quality of the water to equally objective information
wmch the thermometer gives me simply reveals to me a con-
adiction. This contradiction motivates on my part a free
c oice of true objectivity. I shall give the name subjectivity
o he objectivity which I have not chosen. As for the rea-
sons for the ‘relativity of sensations,” a further examination
w reveal thern to me in certain objective, synthetic struc-
mres which I shall call forms (Gestalt). The Miiller-Lyers
^lon, the relativity of the senses, etc., are so many names
^ ^ o objective laws concerning the structures of these
laws teach us nothing about appearances, but
synthetic structures. I intervene here only to
upsurge into the world gives birth to this
of objects with each other. As such
revea ed as forms. Scientific objectivity consists in
THE BODY
413
considering the structures separately by isolating them from
the whole; hence they appear with other characteristics. But
in no case do we get out of an existing world. In the same
way we might show that what is called the “threshold of
sensation” or the specificity of the senses is referred back to
pure determinations of objects as such.
Yet some have claimed that this objective relation of the
stimulant to the sense organ is itself surpassed toward a re-
lation of the objective (stimulant-sense organ) to the sub-
jective (pure sensation) and that this subjective is defined
by the action exercised on us by the stimulant through the
intermediary of the sense organ. The sense organ appears
to us to be affected by the stimulant; the protoplasmic and
physical-chemical modifications which appear in the sense
organ are not actually produced by that organ; they come to
it from the outside. At least we assert this in order to remain
faithful to the principle of inertia which constitutes all na-
ture as exteriority. Therefore when we establish a correlation
between the objective system (stimulant-sensory organ) which
we presently perceive, and the subjective systern which for
us is the ensemble of the internal properties of the other-
object, then we are compelled to admit that the new mo-
dality which has just appeared in this subjectivity in connec-
tion with the stimulation of the sense is also produced by
something other than itself. If it were produced spontane-
ously, in fact, it would immediately be cut off from all con-
nection with the organ stimulated, or if you prefer, the re-
lation which could be established between them would be
anything whatsoever. Therefore we shall conceive of an ob-
jective unity corresponding to even the tiniest and shortest
of perceptible stimulations, and we shall call it sensation.
We shall endow this unity with inertia; that is, it will be
pure exteriority since, conceived in terms of the “this” it
will participate in the exteriority of the in-itself. This ex-
teriority which is projected into the heart of the sensation
touches it almost in its very existence; its reason for being
and the occasion of its existence are outside of it. It is there-
fore an exteriority to itself. At the same time its raison
d’etre does not reside in any “internal” fact of the same
nature as it but in a real object (the stimulant) and in the
change which affects another real object (the sense organ).
Nevertheless as it remains inconceivable that a certain being
existing on a certain level of being and incapable of being
414
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
supported in being by itself alone can be determined to exist
by an existent standing on a plane of being which is radical-
ly distinct, I must in order to support the sensation and in
order to furnish it with being, conceive of an environment
which is homogeneous with it and constituted likewise in
exteriority. This environment I call mind or sometimes even
consciousness. But I conceive of this consciousness as an
Other’s consciousness — ^that is, as an object. Nonetheless as
the relations which I wish to establish between the sense
organ and the sensation must be universal, I posit that the
consciousness thus conceived must be also my consciousness,
not for the other but in itself. Thus I have determined a
sort of internal space in which certain figures called, sensa-
tions are formed on the occasion of external stimulations.
Since this space is pure passivity, I declare that it suffers its
sensations. But I do not thereby mean only that it is the in-
ternal environment which serves as matrix for them. I am
inspired at present with a biological vision of the world
which I bon'ow for my objective conception of the sensory
organ considered, and I claim that this internal space lives
Its sensation. Thus /i/e is a magical connection which I es-
tabhsh between a passive environment and a passive mode
of this environment. The mind does not produce its own
sensations and hence they remain exterior to it; but on the
ottier hand, it appropriates them to itself by living them,
^e unity of the “lived” and the “living” is no longer in-
eed a spatial juxtaposition nor a relation of content to con-
tainer, it is a magical inherence. The mind is its own sensa-
tions while remaining distinct from them. Thus sensation
ecomes a particular type of object — inert, passive, and sim-
p y ived. Behold us now obliged to bestow on it absolute
su jectivity. But the word “subjectivity” must be correctly
‘ does not mean here the belonging to a sub-
mu* which spontaneously motivates it-
® subjectivity of the psychologist is of an entirely
contrary, it manifests inertia and the
ence or all transcendence. That is subjective which can
itself. And precisely to the extent that sensa-
in m pure exteriority, can be only an impression
Stc ®^tent that it is only itself, only
nnt which IS formed by an eddy in psychic space, it is
fered purely and simply that which is suf-
^ > simp e determination of our receptivity. It is sub-
THE BODY
415
jectivity because it is neither presentative nor representative.
The subjective quality of the Other-as-object is purely and
simply a closed box. Sensation is inside the box.
Such is the notion of sensation. We can see its absurdity.
First of all, it is pure fiction. It does not correspond to any-
thing which I experience in myself or with regard to the
Other. We have apprehended only the objective universe; all
our personal determinations suppose the world and arise as
relations to the world. Sensation supposes that man is already
in the world since he is provided with sense organs, and it
appears in him as the pure cessation of his relations with the
world. At the same time this pure “subjectivity” is given as
the necessary basis on which all these transcendent relations
which its appearance has just caused to disappear will have to
be reconstructed. Thus we meet with these three stages of
thought:
. (1) In order to establish sensations we must proceed on the
basis of a certain realism; thus we take as valid our perception
of the Other, the Other’s senses, and inductive instruments.
(2) " But on the level of sensation all this realism dis-
appears; sensation, a modification which one suffers, gives
us information only about ourselves; it belongs with the
“lived.”
(3) Nevertheless it is sensation which I give as the basis
of my knowledge of the external world. This basis could not
be the foundation of a real contact with things; it does not
allow us to conceive of an intentional structure of the mind.
We are to use the term objectivity not for an immediate
connection with being but for certain combinations of sensa-
tions which will present more permanence or more regularity
or which will accord better with the ensemble of our repre-
sentations. In particular it is thus that we shall have to define
perception of the Other, the Other’s sense organs, and in-
ductive instruments. We are dealing with subjective forma-
tions of a particular coherence — that • is all. On this level
there can be no question of explaining my sensation by the
sense organ as I perceive it in the Other or in myself; quite
the contrary, it is the sense organ which I explain as a certain
association of my sensations. We can see the inevitable circle.
My perception of the Other’s senses serves me as a foundation
for an explanation of sensations and in particular of my sensa-
tions, but reciprocally my sensations thus conceived constitute
the only reality of my perception of the Other’s senses. In
416
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
this circle the same object — ^the Other’s sense organ — main-
tains neither the same nature nor the same truth throughout
each of its appearances. It is at first reality, and then because
it is reality it founds a doctrine which contradicts it. In
appearance the structure of the classical theory of sensation
is exactly that of the Cynic argument of the Liar in that it is
precisely because the Cretan tells the truth that he is found
to be lying. But in addition, as we have just seen, a sensation
is pure subjectivity. How are we supposed to construct an
object out of subjectivity? No synthetic grouping can confer
an objective quality on what is on principle of the nature of
what is lived. M there is to be perception of objects in the
world, it is necessary that from the time of our very up-
surge we should be in the presence of the world and of ob-
jects. Sensation, a hybrid notion between the subjective and
the objective, conceived from the standpoint of the object
and applied subsequently to the subject, a bastard existence
concerning which we can not say whether it exists in fact
or in theory — sensation is a pure daydream of the psycholo-
gist. It must be deliberately rejected by any 'serious theory
concerning the relations between consciousness and the
world.
But if sensation is only a word, what becomes of the
senses? No doubt one will recognize that we never in our-
selves encounter that phantom and strictly subjective impres-
sion which is sensation. One will admit that I apprehend only
the green of this notebook, of this foliage and never the sensa-
tion of green nor even the “quasi-green” which Husserl posits
as the hyletic material which the intention animates into
green-as-object. One will declare that he is easily convinced
of the fact that on the supposition that the phenomenological
reduction is possible — which remains to be proved — it will
put us face to face with objects put within brackets as the
pure correlates of .positional acts but not of impressional
residues. Nonetheless it is still true that the senses remain.
/ see the green, touch this cold, polished marble. An acci-
dent can deprive me of a whole sense; I can lose my sight,
become deaf, etc. What then is a sense which does not give us
sensation?
The answer is easy. Let us establish first that senses are
ever^here and yet everywhere inapprehensible. This inkwell
on the table is given to me immediately in the form of a thing
and yet it is given to me by sight. This means that its pres-
THE BODY
417
ence is a visible presence and that I am conscious that it is
present to me as visible — ^that is, I am conscious (of) seeing
it. But at the same time that sight is knowledge of the ink-
well, sight slips away from all knowledge; there is no
knowledge of sight. Even reflection will not give us this
knowledge. My reflective consciousness will give to me in-
deed a knowledge of my reflected-on consciousness of the
inkwell but not that of a sensory activity. It is in this sense
that we must take the famous statement of Auguste Comte:
“The eye can not see itself.” It would be admissible, in-
deed, that another organic structure, a contingent arrange-
ment of our visual apparatus would enable a third eye to
see our two eyes while they were seeing. Can I not see and
touch my hand while it is touching? But then I shall be
assuming the point of view of the Other with regard to my
senses. I should be seeing eyes-as-objects; I can not see the eye
seeing; 1 can not touch my hand as it is touching. Thus any
sense in so far as it is-for-me is an inapprehensible; it is not
the infinite collection of my sensations since I never encounter
anything but objects in the world. On the other hand if I
assume a reflective point of view on my consciousness, I shall
encounter my consciousness of this or that thing-in-the-world,
not my visual or tactile sense; finally if I can see or touch my
sense organs, I have the revelation of pure objects in the
world, not of a revealing or constructive activity. Nevertheless
the senses are there. There is sight, touch, hearing.
On the other hand, if I consider the system of seen objects
which appear to me, I establish that they are not presented to
me in just any order; they are oriented. Therefore since a
sense can not be defined either by an apprehensible act or by
a succession of lived states, it remains for us to attempt to de-
fine it by its objects. If sight is not the sum of visual sensa-
tions, can it not be the system of seen objects? In this case it
is necessary to return to that idea of orientation which we in-
dicated earlier and to attempt to grasp its significance.
In the fihst place let us note that orientation is a constitu-
tive structure of the thing. The object appears on the ground
of the world and manifests itself in a relation of exteriority
with other “thises” which have just appeared. Thus its revela-
tion implies the complementary constitution of an xmdifferen-
tiated ground which is the total perceptive field or the world.
The formal structure of this relation of the figure to the
ground is therefore necessary. In a word, the existence of a
418
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
visual or tactile or auditory field is a necessity; silence, for ex-
ample, is the resonant field of undifferentiated noises in which
the particular sound on which we focused is swallowed up.
But the material connection of a particular “this” to the
ground is both chosen and given. It is chosen in so far as the
upsurge of the for-itself is an explicit and internal negation of
a particular “this” on the ground of the world: I look at the
cup or the inkwell. It is given in the sense that my choice op-
erates in terms of an original distribution of the thises which
manifests the very facticity of my upsurge. It is necessary that
the book appear to me on the right or on the left side of the
table. But it is contingent that the book appears to me specif-
ically on the left, and finally I am free to look at the book on
the table or at the table supporting the book. It is this con-
tingency between the necessity and the freedom of my choice
that we call sense. It means that an object must always appear
to me all at once — it is the cube, the inkwell, the cup which
I see but that this appearance always takes place in a partic--
ular perspective which expresses its relations to the ground of
the world and to other thises. It is always the note of the vio-
lin which I hear. But it is necessary that I hear it through
a door or by the open window or in a concert hall. Otherwise
the object would no longer be in the midst of the world and
would no longer be manifested to an existent-rising-up-in-the-
world.
On the other hand while it is very true that all the thises
can not appear at once on the ground of the world and that
the appearance of certain among them results in the fusion
of certain others with the ground, while it is true that each
tlm can manifest itself only in one way at a time although
there exists for it an infinity of ways of appearing, stUl
ese rules of appearance should not be considered as sub-
jec ive and psychological. They are strictly objective and de-
nature of things. If the inkwell hides a portion
o the table from me, this does not stem from the nature of
my sense but from the nature of the inkwell and of light. If
e. o ject gets smaller when moving away, we must not ex-
^ some kind of illusion in the observer but by the
strictly external laws of perspective. Thus by these objective
s a strictly objective center of reference is defined.
^ perspective scheme the eye is the point
percentivT^fi^H ^ f objective lines converge. Thus the
P ptive field refers to a center objectively defined by that
THE BODY
419
reference and located in the very field which is oriented
around it. Only we do not see this center as the structure
of the perceptive field considered; we are the center. Thus
the order of the objects in the world perpetually refers
to us the image of an object which on principle can
not be an object for us since it is what we have to be. The
structure of the world demands that we can not see without
being visible. The intra-mundane references can be made only
to objects in the world, and the seen world perpetually defines
a visible object to which its perspectives and its arrange-
ments refer. This object appears in the midst of the world and
at the same time as the world. It is always given as an addi-
tion to some grouping of objects since it is defined by the
orientation of these objects; without it there would be no
orientation since all orientations would be equivalent. It is the
contingent upsurge of one orientation among the infinite
possibilities of orienting the world; it is this orientation raised
to the absolute. But on this level this object exists for us only
in the capacity of an abstract indication; it is what everything
indicates to me and what on principle I can not apprehend
since it is what I am. In fact what I am can not on principle
be an object for me inasmuch as I am it. The object which
the things of the world indicate and which they include in
their radius is for itself and on principle a non-object.
But the upsurge of my being, by unfolding distances in
terms of a center, by the very act of this unfolding deter-
mines an object which is itself in so far as it causes itself
to be indicated by the world; and I could have no intuition
of it as object because I am it, I who am presence to myself
as the being which is its own nothingness. Thus my being-in-
the-world, by the sole fact that it realizes a world, causes itself
to be indicated to itself as a being-in-the-midst-of-the-world
by the world which it realizes. The case could not be other-
wise, for my being has no other way of entering into contact
with the world except to be in the world. It would be im-
possible for me to realize a world in which I was not and
which would be for me a pure object of a surveying contem-
plation. But on the contrary it is necessary that I lose myself
in the world in order for the world to exist and for me to be
able to transcend it. Thus to say that I have entered into the
world, “come to the world,” or that there is a world, or that
I have a body is one and the same thing. In this sense my
body is everywhere in the world; it is over there in the fact
420
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
that the lamp-post hides the bush which grows along the
path, as well m the fact that the roof up there is above the
windows of the sixth floor or in the fact that a passing car
swerves from right to left behind the truck or that the woman
who is crossing the street appears smaller than the man who
is sitting on the sidewalk in front of the cafe. My body is co-
extensive with the world, spread across all things, and at the
same time it is condensed into this single point which all
things indicate and which I am, without being able to know it.
This explanation should allow us to understand the meaning
of the senses.
A sense is not given before sensible objects. For is it not
capable indeed of appearing as an object to the Other?
Neither is it given after sensible objects; for in that case it
would be necessary to suppose a world of incommunicable
images, simple copies of reality the mechanism of whose ap-
pearance was inconceivable. The senses are contemporaneous
with objects; they are things “in person” as they are revealed
to us in perspective. They represent simply an objective rule
of this revelation. Thus sight does not produce visual sensa-
tions; neither is it affected by light rays. It is the collection of
all visible objects in so far as their objective and reciprocal
relations all refer to certain chosen sizes — submitted to all at
once — as measures, and to a certain center of perspective.
From this point of view the senses must in no way be identi-
fied with .subjectivity. In fact all variations which can be reg-
istered in a perceptive field are objective variations. In partic-
ular, the fact that one can cut off vision by “closing the eye-
lids” is an external fact which does not refer to the subjectiv-
ity of apperception. The eyelid, in fact, is merely one
object perceived among other objects, an object which hides
other objects from me as the result of its objective relation
with them. No longer to see the objects in my room because I
have closed my eyes is to see the curtain of my eyelids. In
the same way if I put my gloves on the tablecloth, then no
longer to see a particular design in the cloth is precisely
to see the gloves. Similarly the accidents which affect a sense
belong to the province of objects. “I see yellow” because I
have jaundice or because I am wearing yellow glasses. In
each case the reason for the phenomenon is not found in a
subjective modification of the sense nor even in an organic
change but in an objective relation between objects in the
world; in each case I see “through” something, and the truth
THE BODY
421
of my vision is objective. Finally if in one way or another
the center of visual reference is destroyed (since destruction
can come only from the development of the world according
to its own laws — Le., expressing in a certain way my factic-
ity), visible objects are not by the same stroke annihilated.
They continue to exist for me, but they exist without any
center of reference, as a visible totality without the appear-
ance of any particular this; that is, they exist in the absolute
reciprocity of their relations. Thus it is the upsurge of the
for-itself in the world which by the same stroke causes the
world to exist as the totality of things and causes senses to
exist as the objective mode in which the qualities of things
are presented. What is fundamental is my relation to the
world, and this relation at once defines the world and the
senses according to the point of view which is adopted.
Blindness, Daltonism, myopia originally represent the way in
which there is a word for me; that is, they define my visual
sense in so far as this is the facticity of my upsurge. This is
why I can know and objectively define my senses but only
emptily, in terms of the world; all that is necessary is that my
rational and universalizing thought should prolong in the
abstract the indications which things give to myself about
my sense and that it reconstitute the sense in terms of these
signs as the historian reconstitutes an historical personality
according to the evidence indicating it. But in Ais case I
have reconstructed the world on the ground of pure rationali-
ty by abstracting myself from the world Through thought.
I survey the world without attaching myself to it; I place
myself in an attitude of absolute objectivity, and each
sense becomes one object among objects, a center of rel-
ative reference and one which itself supposes coordi-
nates. But thereby I establish in thought the absolute equiva-
lence of all centers of reference. I destroy the world’s quality
of being a world- -without my even being aware of it. Thus
the world by perpetually indicating the senses which I am and
by inviting me to recon.stitute it Impels me to eliminate the
personal equation which I am by reinstating in the world the
center of mundane reference in relation to which the world is
arranged. But by the same stroke I escape — ^through abstract
thought — ^from the senses which I am; that is, I cut my bonds
With the world. I place myself in a state of simple surveying,
and the world disappears in the absolute equivalence of its in-
finite possible relations. The senses indeed are our being-in-
422
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the-world in so far as we have .to be it in the form of being-
in-the-midst-of-the-world.
These observations can be generalized; they can be applied
in toto to my body inasmuch as it is the total center of refer-
ence which things indicate. In particular our body is not
only what has long been called “the seat of the five senses”;
it is also the instrument and the end of our actions. It is im-
possible to distinguish “sensation” from “action” even if we
use the terms of classical psychology; this is v/hat we had in
mind when we made the observation that reality is presented
to us neither as a thing nor as an instrument but as an in-
strumental-thing. This is why for our study of the body as a
center of action we shall be able to take as a guiding thread
the reasoning which has served us to reveal the true nature
of the senses.
As soon as v/e formulate the problem of action, we risk
falling into a confusion with grave consequences. When I
take this pen and plunge it into the inkwell I am acting.
But if I look at Pierre who at that same instant is drawing
up a chair to the table, I establish also that he is acting.
Thus there is here a very distinct risk of committing the
mistake which we denounced apropos of the senses; that is,
of interpreting my action as it is-for-me in terms of the
Other’s action. This is because the only action which I can
know at the same time that it is taking place is the action
of Pierre. I see his gesture and at the same time I determine
his goal: he is drawing a chair up to the table in order to be
able to sit down near the table and to write the letter which
he told rne he wished to write. Thus I can apprehend all the
intermediate positions of the chair and of the body which
rnoves it as instrumental organizations; they are ways to ar-
rive at one pursued end. The Other’s body appears .to me
here as one instrument in the midst of other instruments,
not only as a tool to make tools but also as a tool to manage
tools, in a word as a tool-machine. If I interpret the role of
body in relation to my action, in the light of the knowl-
edge I have gained of the Other’s body, I shall then con-
sider myself as disposing of a certain instrument which I can
ispose of at my whim and which in turn will dispose of
ot er instruments all functioning toward a certain end which
I pursue.
back to the classical distinction be-
n e soul, and the body; the soul utilizes the tool which
THE BODY
423
is the body. The parallel with the theory of sensation is per-
fect. We have seen indeed that the latter started from the
knowledge of the Other’s senses and that subsequently it
endowed me with senses exactly similar to the sensible or-
gans which I perceived in the Other. We have seen also the
difficulty which such a theory immediately encountered; this
is because I then perceive the world and particularly the
Other’s sense organs through my own sense, a distorting or-
gan, a refracting environment which can give me no infor-
mation on its own affections. Thus the consequences of the
theory ruin the objectivity of the very principle which has
served to establish them. The theory of action, since it has
an analogous structure, encounters analogous difficulties. In
fact if I start with the Other’s body, I apprehend it as an in-
strument and in so far as I myself make use of it as an in-
strument. I can utilize it in order to arrive at ends which I
could not attain alone; I command its acts through orders or
supplications; I can also provoke its act by my own acts. At
the same time I must take precautions with respect to a tool
which is particularly delicate and dangerous to handle. In
relation to it I stand in the complex attitude of the worker
with respect to his tool-machine when simultaneously he di-
rects its movements and avoids being caught by it. Once
again in order to utilize the Other’s body to my best inter-
ests I need an instrument which is my own body just as in
order to perceive the Other’s sense oTgans I need other sense
organs which are my own. Therefore if I conceive of my
body in the image of the Other’s body, it is an instrument,
in the world which I must handle delicately and which is
like a key to the handling of other tools. But my relations
with this privileged instrument can themselves be only tech-
nical, and I need an instrument in order to handle this in-
strument — ^which refers us to infinity. Thus if I conceive of
my sense organs as like those of the Other, they require a
sense organ in order to perceive them; and if I apprehend
my body as an instrument like the Other’s body, it demands
an instrument to manage it; and if we refuse to conceive of
this appeal to infinity, then we must of necessity admit that
paradox of a physical instrument handled by a soul, which,
as we know, causes us to fall into inextricable aporias.
Let us see whether we can attempt here as with the prob-
leni of sensations to restore to the body its nature-for-us.
Objects are revealed to us at the heart of a complex of in-
424
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
strumentality in which they occupy a determined place. This
place is not defined by pure spatial coordinates but in rela-
tion to axes of practical reference. ‘T/ze gloss is on the cof-
fee table”; this means that we must be careful not to upset
the glass if we move the table. The package of tobacco is on
the mantelpiece; this means that we must clear a distance of
three yards if we want to go from the pipe to the tobacco
while avoiding certain obstacles — end tables, footstools, etc,
— ^which are placed between the mantelpiece and the table.
In this sense perception is in no way to be distinguished
from the practical organization of existents into a world.
Each instrument refers to other instruments, to those which
are its keys and to those for which it is the key. But these
references could not be grasped by a purely contemplative
consciousness. For such a consciousness the hammer would
not refer to the nails but would be alongside them; further-
more the expression “alongside” loses all meaning if it does
not outline a path which goes from the hammer to the nail
and which must be cleared. The space which is originally
revealed to me is hodological space; it is furrowed with paths
and highways; it is instrumental and it is the location of
tools. Thus the world from the moment of the upsurge of
my For-itself is revealed as the indication of acts to be per-
formed; these acts refer to other acts, and those to others,
and so on. It is to be noted however that if from this point
of view perception and action are indistinguishable, action is
nevertheless presented as a future efficacy which surpasses
and transcends the pure and simple perceived. Since the per-
ceived is that to which my For-itself is presence, it is re-
vealed to me as co-presence; it is immediate contact, present
adherence, it brushes lightly over me. But as such it is of-
fered without my being able at present to grasp it. The thing
perceived is full of promises; it touches me lightly in pass-
ing, and each of the properties which it promises to reveal
to me, each surrender silently consented to, each meaningful
reference to other objects engages the future.
Thus I am in the presence of things which are only prom-
ises beyond an ineffable presence which I can not possess
and which is the pure “being-there” of things; that is, the
mine, ^ my facticity, my body. The cup is there on the sau-
cer, it is presently given to me with its bottom side which
A which everything indicates but which I do not see.
nd if I wish to see the bottom side — i.e., to make it ex- _
THE BODY
425
plicit, to make it “appear-on-the-bottom-of-the-cup” — it is
necessary for me to grasp the cup by the handle and turn it
upside down. The bottom of the cup is at the end of my
projects, and it amounts to the same thing whether I say that
the other structures of the cup indicate it as an indispensable
element of the cup or that they indicate it to me as the ac-
tion which will best appropriate the cup for me with its
meaning. Thus the world as the correlate of the possibilities
which I am appears from the moment of my upsurge as the
enormous skeletal outline of all my possible actions. Percep-
tion is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be
revealed only in and through projects of action. The world
is revealed as an “always future hollow,” for we are always
future to ourselves.^
Yet it must be noted that this future of the world which
is thus revealed to us is strictly objective. The instrumental-
things indicate other instruments or objective ways of mak-
ing use of them: the nail is “to be pounded in” this way or
that, the hammer is “to be held by the handle,” the cup is
“to be picked up by its handle,” etc. All these properties
of things are immediately revealed, and the Latin gerundives
perfectly translate them. Of course they are correlates of non-
thetic projects which we are, but they are revealed only as
structures of the world: potentialities, absences, instrumental-
ities. Thus the world appears to me as objectively articulated;
it never refers to a creative subjectivity but to an infinity of
instrumental complexes.
Nevertheless while each instrument refers to another in-
strument and this to another, all end Up by indicating an
instrument which stands as the key for all. This center of
reference is necessary, for otherwise all the instrumentalities
would become equivalent and the world would vanish due
to the total undifferentiation of gerundives. Carthage is “cfe-
lenda” toT the Romans but “servanda” for the Carthagini-
ans. Without relation to its centers Carthage is no longer
anything; it falls into the indifference of the in-itself, for
the two gerundives annihilate each other. Nevertheless we
must of necessity see that the key is never given to me but
only indicated by a sort of gap.^ What I objectively appre-
hend in action is a world of instruments which encroach on
^Tr. "Creux toujours Jutur." There is a suggestion here of a mold to
be filled but, of course, with no idea of a determined future
-Tr. Indiquie en creux; literally, "indicated -m a hollow (or mold)."
426
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
one another, and each of them, as it is apprehended in the
very act by which I adapt myself to it and surpass it, refers
to another instrument which must enable me to utilize this
one. In this sense the nail refers to the hammer and the
hammer refers to the hand and the arm which utilizes it.
But it is only to the extent that I cause the nails to be pound-
ed in by the Other that the hand and the arm become in
turn instruments which I utilize and which I surpass toward
their potentiality. In this case the Other’s hand refers me to
the instrument which wiU allow me to utilize this hand (to
threats-promises-salary, etc.). The first term is present every-
where but it is only indicated. I do not apprehend my hand
in the act of writing but only the pen which is writing; this
means^ that I use my pen in order to form letters but not my
hand in order to hold the pen. I am not in relation to my
hand in the same utilizing attitude as I am in relation to the
pen; I am my hand. That is, my hand is the arresting of ref-
erences and their ultimate end. The hand is only the utiliza-
tion of the pen. In this sense the hand is at once the un-
knowable and non-utilizable term which the last instrument
of the series indicates (“book to be read — characters to be
ormed on the paper — ^pen”) and at the same time the ori-
entation of the entire series (the printed book itself refers
back to the hand). But I can apprehend it — at least in so far
as It IS acting only as the perpetual, evanescent reference
o the whole series. Thus in a duel with swords or with
quarter-staffs, it is the quarter-staff which I watch with my
eyes and which I handle. In the act of writing it is the point
o e pen which I look at in synthetic combination with
u ^ square marked on the sheet of paper. But my
7^°^jshed; it is lost in the complex system of in-
^ order that this system may exist. It is simply
the meaniqg and the orientation of the system.
seems, we find ourselves before a double and con-
necessity; since every instrument is utilizable and
th! of another instrument,
tool indefinite, objective reference from tool to
can structure of the world implies that we
beinp instrumentality only by
beino ^ an instrument, that we can not act without
comolf^y no other hand, an instrumental
dinal mpan° ^ revoked only by the determination of a car-
ing o this complex, and this determination is
THE BODY
427
itself practical and active — ^to pound a nail, to sow seed. In
this case the very existence of the complex immediately re-
fers to a center. Thus this center is at once a tool objectively
defined by the instrumental field which refers to it and at the
same time the tool which we can not utilize since we should
thus be referred to infinity. We do not use this instrument,
for we are -it. It is given to us in no other way than by the
instrumental order of the world, by hodological space, by
the univocal or reciprocal relations of machines, but it can
not be given to my action. I do not have to adapt myself to
it nor to adapt another tool to it, but it is my very adapta-
tion to tools, the adaptation which I am.
This' is why if we reject the analogical reconstruction of
my body according to the body of the Other, there remain
two ways of apprehending the body: First, it is known and
objectively defined in terms of the world but emptily; for
this view it is enough that rationalizing thought reconstitute
the instrument which I am from the standpoint of the in-
dications which are given by the instruments which I uti-
lize. In this case, however, the fundamental tool becomes a
relative center of reference which itself supposes other tools
to utilize it. By the same stroke the instrumentality of the
world disappears, for in order to be revealed it needs a ref-
erence to an absolute center of instrumentality; the world of
action becomes the world acted upon of classical science; con-
sciousness surveys a universe of exteriority and can no longer
in any way enter into the world. Secondly the body is given
concretely and fully as the very arrangement of things in so
far as the For-itself surpasses it toward a new arrangement
In this case the body is present in every action although in-
visible, for the act reveals the hammer and the nails7 the
brake and the change of speed, not the foot which brakes
or the hand which hammers. The body is lived and not
known. This explains why the famous “sensation of effort”
by which Maine de Biran attempted to reply to Hume’s
challenge is a psychological myth. We never have any sensa-
tion of our effort, but neither do we have peripheral sensa-
tions from the muscles, bones, tendons, or skin, which have
been suggested to replace the sensation of effort. We per-
ceive the resistance of things. What I perceive when I want
to lift this glass to my mouth is not my effort but the heavi-
ness of the glass — ^that is, its resistance to entering into an
instrumental complex which I have made appear in the world.
428 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Bachelard rightly reproaches phenomenology for not
sufficiently taking into accoimt what he calls the “coefficient
of adversity” in objects.^ The accusation is just and applies
to Heidegger’s transcendence as well as to Husserl’s intention-
ality. But we must understand that the instrumentality is pri-
mary: it is in relation to an original instrumental complex
that things reveal their resistance and their adversity. The bolt
is revealed as too big to be screwed into the nut, the pedestal
too fragile to support the weight which I want to hold up,
the stone too heavy to be lifted up to the top of the wall, etc.
Other objects will appear as threatening to an instrumental
complex already established — ^the storm and the hail threaten-
ing to the harvest, the phylloxera to the vine, the fire to the
house. Thus step by step and across the instrumental com-
plexes already established, their threat will extend to the center
of reference which all these instruments indicate, and in turn
it will indicate this center through them. In this sense every
means is simultaneously favorable and adverse but within the
limits of the fundamental project realized by the upsurge of
the For-itself in the world. Thus my body is indicated origi-
nally by instrumental complexes and secondarily by destruc-
tive devices. I live my body in danger as regards menacing
machines as for manageable instruments. My body is every-
where; the bomb which destroys my house also damages my
body in so far as the house was already an indication of my
body. This is why my body always extends across the tool
which it utilizes: it is at the end of the cane on which I
lean and against the earth; it is at the end of the telescope
which shows me the stars; it is on the chair, in the whole
house; for it is my adaptation to these tools.
Thus at the end of this account sensation and action are
rejoined and become one. We have given up the idea of
first endowing ourselves with a body in order to study
second the way in which we apprehend or modify the
world through the body. Instead we have laid down as the
foundation of the revelation of the body as such our original
relation to the world — ^that is, our very upsurge into the midst
of being. Far from the body being first for us and revealing
things to us, it is the instrumental-things which in their origi-
nal appearance indicate our body to us. The body is not a
screen between things and ourselves; it manifests only the
individuality and the contingency of our original relation to
Bachelard, L’Eau et les Reves. Editions Jos6 Corti. 1942.
THE BODY
429
instramental-things. In this sense we defined the senses and
the sense organs in general as our being-in-the-world in so
far as we have to be it in the form of being-in-the-midst-of
the world. Similarly we can define action as our being-in-the-
world in so far as we have to be it in the form of being-an-
instrument-in-the-midst-of-the-world. But if I am in the
midst of the world, this is because I have caused the world
to-be-there by transcending being toward myself. And if I
am an instrument in the world, this is because I have caused
instruments in general to-be-there by the projection of myself
toward my possibles. It is only in a world that there can be a
body, and a primary relation is indispensable in order that
this world may exist. In one sense the body is what I imme-
diately am. In another sense I am separated from it by the in-
finite density of the world; it is given to me by a reflux of the
world toward my f acticity, and the condition of this reflux of
the world toward my facticity is a perpetual surpassing.
We are now able to define our body’s nature-for-us. The
preceding observations have allowed us to conclude that the
body is perpetually the surpassed. The body as a sensible cen-
ter of reference is that beyond which I am in so far as I am
immediately present to the glass or to the table or to the dis-
tant tree ^hich I perceive. Perception, in fact, can be accom-
plished only at the very place where the object is perceived
and without distance. But at the same time it unfolds the dis-
tances, and that in relation to which the perceived object in-
dicates its distance as an absolute property of its being is the
body. Similarly as an instrumental center of instrumental com-
plexes the body can be only the surpassed; it is that which I
surpass toward a new combination of complexes and which I
shall perpetually have to surpass whatever may be the in-
strumental combination at which I arrive; for every combina-
tion from the moment that my surpassing fixes it in its being
indicates the body as the center of reference f«r its own fixed
immobility. Thus the body, since it is surpassed, is the Past.
It is the immediate presence to the For-itself of “sensible”
things in so far as this presence indicates a center of reference
and is already surpassed either toward the appearance of a
new this or toward a new combination of instrumental-things.
ti each project of the For-itself, in each perception the body
is there; it is the immediate Past in so far as it still touches
on the Present which flees it. This means that it is at once a
430
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
point of view and a point of departure — a point of view, a
point of departure which I am and which at the same time I
surpass toward what I have to be.
This point of view which is perpetually surpassed and
which is perpetually reborn at the heart of the surpassing,
this point of departure which I do not cease to leave and
which is myself rem ainin g behind me — ^this is the necessity
of my contingency. It is doubly necessary. First it is neces-
sary because it is the continual reapprehension of the For-itself
by the In-itself and the ontolo^cal fact that the For-itself can
be only as the being which is not its own foundation. To have
a body is to be the foundation of one’s own nothingness and
not to be the foimdation of one’s being; I am my body to the
extent that I cm; I am not my body to the extent that I am
not what I am. It is by my nihilation that I escape it But I do
not thereby make an object of it, for what I am is what I
perpetually escape. The body is necessary again as the obstacle
to be surpassed in order to be in the world; that is, the
obstacle which I am to myself. In this sense it is not different
from the absolute order of the world, this order which I cause
to arrive in being by surpassing it toward a being-to-come,
toward being-beyond-being. We can clearly grasp the unity
of these two necessities: being-for-itself is to surpass the
world and to cause there to be a world by surpassing it. But
to surpass the world is not to survey it but to be engaged in
it in order to emerge from it; it is necessary always that a
particular perspective of surpassing be effected. In this sense
finitude is the necessary condition of the original project of
the For-itself. The necessary condition for me to be what I
am not and to not-be what I am — ^beyond a world which I
cause to come into being — this condition is that at the heart
of the infimte pursuit which I am there should be perpetually
an inapprehensible given. This given which I am without
having to be it — except in the mode of non-being — ^this I
can neither grasp nor know, for it is everywhere recovered
and surpasse^ utilized for my assumed projects. On the other
hand eveiyihing indicates it to me, every transcendent outlines
it in a sort of hollow by its very transcendence without my
ever being able to turn back on that which it indicates
smce I am the being indicated. In particular we must not
understand the indicated-given as a pure center of reference
of a static order of ihstrumental-things. On the contrary
eir dynamic order, whether it depends on my action or not,
THE BODY -
431
refers to it according to rules, and thereby the center of refer-
ence is defined in its change as in its identity. The case could
not be otherwise since it is by denying that I am being that I
make the world come into being and since it is from the
standpoint of my past — i.e., in projecting myself beyond my
own being — ^that I can deny that I am this or that particular
being. From this point of view the body — i.e., this inappre-
hensible given — is a necessary condition of my action. In
fact if the ends which I pursue could be attained by a purely
arbitrary wish, if it were sufficient to hope in order to obtain,
and if definite rules did not determine the use of instruments,
I could never distinguish within me desire from will, nor
dream from act, nor the possible from the real. No project of
myself would be possible since it would be enough to conceive
of it in order to realize it. Consequently my being-for-myself
would be annihilated in the indistinction of present and
future. A phenomenology of action would in fact show
that the act supposes a break in continuity between the
simple conception and the realization — ^that is, between
a universal and abstract thought such as “A carburetor
must not be clogged" and a technical and concrete thought
directed upon this particular carburetor as it appe^s to me
with its absolute dimensions and its absolute position. The
condition of this technical thought, which is not distin-
guished from the act which it directs, is my finitude, my
contingency, finally my facticity.
Now, to be exact, I am in fact in so far as I have a past,
and this immediate past refers to the primary in-itself on the
nihilation of which I arise through birth. Thus the body as
facticity is the past as it refers originally to a birth; that is, to
the primary nihilation which causes me to arise from the
In-itself which I am in fact without having to be it. Birth,
the past, contingency, the necessity of a point of view, the
factual condition for all possible action of the world — such
is the body, such it is for me. It is therefore in no way a con-
tingent addition to my soul; on the contrary it is a per-
manent structure of my being and the permanent condition of
possibility for my consciousness as consciousness of the world
and as a transcendent project toward my future. From this
point of view we must recognize both that it is altogether
contingent and absurd that I am a cripple, the son of a civil
servant or of a laborer, irritable and lazy, and that it is never-
theless necessary that I be that or else something else, French
432
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
or German or English, etc,, a proletarian or bourgeois or aris-
tocrat, etc., weak and sickly or vigorous, irritable or of amia-
ble disposition — ^precisely because I can not survey the world
without the world disappearing. My birth as it conditions
the way in which objects are revealed to me (objects of luxury
or of basic necessity are more or less accessible, certain social
realities appear to me as forbidden, there are barriers and
obstacles in my hodological space) ; my race as it is indicated
by the Other’s attitude with regard to me (these attitudes are
revealed as scornful or admiring, as trusting or distrusting);
my class as it is disclosed by the revelation of the social
conamunity to which I belong inasmuch as the places which I
frequent refer to it; my nationality; my physiological struc-
ture as instruments imply it by the very way in which they
are revealed as resistant or docile and by their very coefficient
of adversity; my character; my past, as everything which I
have experienced is indicated as my point of view on the
world by the world itself: all this in so far as I surpass it. in
the syntihetic unity of my being-in-the-world is my body as
the necessary condition of the existence of a world and as the
contingent realization of this condition.
Now at last we can grasp clearly the definition which we
gave earlier of the body in its being-for-us: the body is the
contingent form which is taken up by the necessity of my
contingency. We can never apprehend this contingency as
such in so far as our body is for us; for we are a choice, and
for us, to be is to choose ourselves. Even this disability from
which I suffer I have assumed by the very fact that I live;
I surpass it toward my own projects, I make of it the neces-
sary obstacle for my being, and I can not be crippled without
choosing myself as crippled. This means that I choose the
way in which I constitute my disability (as “unbearable,”
“humiliating,” “to be hidden,” “to be revealed to all,” “an
object of pride.” “the justification for my failures,” etc,'). But
this inapprehensible body is. precisely the necessity that
there be a choice, that I do not exist all at once. In this
sense my finitude is the condition of my freedom, for there is
no freedom without choice; and in the same way that die
body conditions consciousness as pure consciousness of the
world, it renders consciousness possible even in its very free-
dom.
. It remains for us to arrive at a conception of what the
body is for me; for precisely because the body is inapprehen-
THE BODY
433
sible, it does not belong to tlie objects in the world — i.e„ to
those objects which I know and which I utilize. Yet on the
other hand since I can be nothing without being the con-
sciousness of what I am, the body must necessarily be in
some way given to my consciousness. In one sense, to be sure,
the body is’ what is indicated by all the instruments which
I grasp, and I apprehend the body without knowing it in
the very indications which I perceive on the instruments.
But if we limit ourselves to this observation, we shall not be
able to distinguish, for example, between the body and
the telescope through which the astronomer looks at the
planets. In fact ’if we define the body as a contingent point
of view on the world, we must recognize that the notion of a
point of view supposes a double relation: a relation with the
things on which the body is a point of view and a rela-
tion with the observer for whom the body is a point of
view. When we are dealing with the body-as-a-point-of-view,
this second relation is radically different from the first; it is
not truly distinct when we are dealing with a point of view
in the world (spectacles, a look-out point, a magnifying glass,
etc,) which is an objective instrument distinct from the
body. A traveler contemplating the landscape from a belve-
dere sees the belvedere as well as the landscape; he sees the
trees between the columns of the belvedere, the roof of the
belvedere hides the sky from him, etc. Nevertheless the “dis-
tance” between him and the belvedere is by definition less
great than that between his eyes and the panorama. The
point of view can approach the body to the point of almost
being dissolved in it, as we see, for example, in the case of
glasses, pince-nez, monocles, etc,, which become, so to speak,
a supplementary sense organ. At its extreme limit — ^if we con-
ceive of an absolute point of view — ^the distance between it
and the one for whom it is a point of view is annihilated. This
means that it would become impossible to withdraw in order
to “give oneself plenty of room” and to constitute a new
point of view on the point of view. It is precisely this fact, as
we have seen, which characterizes the body. It is the instru-
ment which I can not use in the way I use any other instru-
ment, the point of view on which I can no longer take a
point of view. This is why on the top of that hill which I
call a “good viewpoint,” I take a point of view at the very in-
stant when I look at the valley, and this point ^ of view on
the point of view is my body. But I can not take a point of
434
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
view on my body without a reference to infinity. Therefore
the body can not be for me transcendent and known; the
spontaneous, unreflective consciousness is no longer the con-
sciousness of the body. It would be best to say, using “exist"
as a transitive verb — that consciousness exists its body. Thus
the relation between the body-as-point-of-view and things is
an objective relation, and the relation of consciousness to the
body is an existential relation, Wliat do we mean by an
existential relation?
First of all, it is evident tliat consciousness can exist its
body only as consciousness. Therefore my body is a conscious
structure of my consciousness. But precisely because the body
is the point of view on which there can not be a point of
view, there is on the level of the unreflective consciousness no
consciousness of the body. The body belongs then to the
structures of the non-thetic self-consciousness. Yet can we
identify it purely and simply with this non-thetic conscious-
ness? That is not possible either, for non-tlietic consciousness
is self-consciousness as the free project toward a possibility
which is its own; that is, in so far as it is the founda-
tion of its own nothingness. Non-positional consciousness is
consciousness (of the) body as being that which it surmounts
and nihilates by making itself consciousness — i.e., as being
something which consciousness is without having to be it
and which it passes over in order to be what it had
to be. In short, consciousness (of) the body is lateral and
retrospective; the body is the neglected, the "passed by in
silence" And yet the body is what this consciousness is; it is
not even anything except body. Tlie rest is nothingness and
silence.
Consciousness of the body is comparable to the conscious-
ness of a sign. The sign moreover is on the side of the body;
it is one of the essential structures of the body. Now the con-
sciousness of a sign exists, for otherwise we should not be able
to understand its meaning. But the sign is that which is sur-
passed toward meaning, that which is neglected for the sake
of the meaning, that which is never apprehended for itself,
that beyond which the look is perpetually directed. Con-
sciousness (of) the body is a lateral and retrospective con-
sciousness of what consciousness is without having to be it
(r.e,, of its mapprehensible contingency, of that in terras of
which consciousness makes itself a choice) and hence it is a
non-thetic consciousness of the manner in which it is
THE BODY
435
affected. Consciousness of the body is often confused with
original aSectivity. Again it is very important to grasp the
meaning of this ai[ectivity; and for this we must make a fur-
ther distinction. Affectivity as introspection reveals it to us is
in fact already a constituted affectivity; it is consciousness
of the world. All hate is hate of someone; all anger is appre-
hension of someone as hateful or unjust or faulty; to have
sympathy for someone is to “find him sympathetic,” etc. In
these various examples a transcendent “intention” is directed
toward the world and apprehends it as such. Already therefore
there is a surpassing, an internal negation; we are on the
level of transcendence and choice. But Scheler has effectively
demonstrated that this “intention” must be distinguished from
pure affective qualities. For example, if I have a “headache”
I can discover within me an intentional affectivity directed to-
ward my pain so as to “suffer” it, to accept it with resigna-
tion, or to reject it, to evd^uate it (as unjust, as deserved, as,
purifying, as humiliating, etc.) so as to escape it. Here it is the
very intention which is the affection; it is pure act and al-
ready a project, a pure consciousness of something. This can
not be what we should consider consciousness (of) the body.
In reality this intention can not be the whole of affectivi-
ty. Since affectivity is a surpassing, it presupposes a sur-
passed. Moreover this is proved by the existence of what
Baldwin incorrectly calls “emotional abstracts.” Baldwin has
indeed established that we can realize affectively within us
certain emotions without feeling them concretely. For ex-
ample, if someone tells me of a particular painful event
which has just darkened the life of Pierre, I shall exclaim,
“How he must have suffered!” I do not know this suffer-
ing and I do not actually feel it. These intermediaries be-
tween pure knowledge and true affection Baldwin calls “ab-
stracts.” But the mechanism: of such ap abstraction remains
very obscure. Who abstracts? If following M. Laporte’s defini-
tion we say that to abstract is to think of structures in isola-
tion which can not exist separately, it is necessary either that
we identify emotional abstracts with pure abstract concepts of
emotions or else that we recognize that these abstracts can
exist as such as real modalities of consciousness. In actuality
these so-caUed “emotional abstracts” are empty intentions,
pure projects of emotion. That is, we direct ourselves to-
ward pain and shame, we strain toward them, consciousness
transcends itself — but emptily. Grief is there, objective and
436 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
transcendent, but it lacks concrete existence. It would be bet-
ter to give for these insubstantial significations the name of
affective images. Their importance of artisfic creation and
psychological understanding is undeniable. But the important
thing here is the fact that what separates them from real
shame, for example, is the absence of the quality of being
lived.
There exist therefore pure affective qualities which are sur-
passed and transcended by affective projects. We shall not
make of them as Scheler did, some kind of “hyle” borne upon
the flux of consciousness. For us it is simply -a matter of the
way in which consciousness exists its contingency; it is the
very texture of consciousness in so far as it surpasses this
texture toward it own possibilities; it is the manner in which
consciousness exists spontaneously and in the non-thetic
mode, that which it constitutes thetically but implicitly as a
point of view on the world. This can be pure grief, but it
can also be a mood, an affective, non-thetic totality, the pure
agreeable, the pure disagreeable. In a general way, it is what
is called coenesthesia. This “coenesthesia” rarely appears
without being surpassed toward the world by a transcendent
project on the part of the For-itself; as such it can only with
difficulty be studied in isolation. Yet there exist some privi-
leged experiences in which it can be apprehended in its pu-
rity, in particular what we call “physical” pain.- Therefore we
shall now examine this experience in order to fix conceptually
the structures of the consciousness (of) the body.
My eyes are hurting but I should finish reading a philosoph-
ical work this evening. I am reading. The object of my
consciousness is the book and across the book the truths
which it points out. The body is in no way apprehended for
itself; it is a point of view ,and a point of departure. The
words slip by one after the other before me; I make them
slip by; those at the bottom of the page which I have not
yet read still belong to a relative ground or “the-page-as-
ground” which is organized upon the “book-as-ground” and
on the absolute ground or ground of the world. But from the
ground of their indistinction they are calling to me; they
aheady possess the character of a friable totality; they are
given as “to be made to slip by xmder my sight.” In all this
the body is given only implicitly; the movement of my eyes
belongs only to an observer’s glance. For myself I apprehend
thetically only this fixed upsurge of the words one after the
THE BODY
437
other. Yet the succession of the words in objective time is
given and known through my own temporalization. Their
motionless movement is given across a “movement” of my
consciousness; and this “movement” of consciousness, a pure
metaphor which designates a temporal progression, is for me
exactly the movement of my eyes. It is impossible for me to
distinguish the movement of my eyes from the synthetic pro-
gression of my states of consciousness without resorting to
the point of view of the Other. Yet at the very moment that
I am reading my eyes hurt. Let us note first that this pain
can itself be indicated by objects of the world; i.e., by the
book which I read. It is with more difiSculty that the words
are detached from, the undifferentiated ground which they
constitute; they may tremble, quiver, their meaning may be
derived only with effort, the sentences which I have just read
twice, three times may be given as “not understood,” as “to
be re-read.” But these same indications can be lacking — ^for
example, in the case when my reading “absorbs me” and
when I “forget” my pain (which does not mean that it has
disappeared since if I happen to gain knowledge of it in a
later reflective act, it will be given as having always been
there) . In any case this is not what interests us; we are look-
ing for the way in which consciousness its pain. But at
the start someone will ask, how is the pain given as pain in
the eyes? Is there not there an intentional reference to a tran-
scendent object, to my body precisely in so far as it exists
outside in the world? It is undeniable that pain contains in-
formation about itself; it is impossible to confuse pain in
the eyes with pain in the finger or the stomach. Neverthe-
less pain is totally void of intentionality. It must be under-
stood that if pain is given as pain “in the eyes,” there is no
mysterious “local sign” there nor any knowledge either. Pain
is precisely the eyes in so far as consciousness “exists them.”
As such it is distinguished from other pain by its very cxis^
tence, not by a criterion nor by anything added on. To be
sure, the expression pain in the eyes supposes a whole con-
stitutive work which we shall have to describe. But at this
stage in the argument, there is not as yet any reason to con-
sider ^s, for it is not made. Pain is not considered from a
reflective point of view; it is not referred back to a body-for-
others. It is the-eyes-as-pain or vision-as-pain; it is not dis-
tmguished from my way of apprehending transcendent words.
We ourselves have called it pain in the eyes for the sake of
438 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
clarity; but it is not named in consciousness, for it is not
known. Pain in the eyes is distinguished from other possi-
ble pains inexpressibly and by its very being.
This pain however does not exist anywhere among the
actual objects of the universe. It is not to the right or to the
left of the book nor among the truths which are revealed
through the book nor in my body-as-object (the body which
the other sees and which I can always partially touch and
partially see), nor in my body-as-a-point-of-view as the lat-
ter is implicitly indicated by the world. Neither must we
say that the pain is an “overprint” or that it is like a har-
mony “superimposed” on the things which I see. Those are
images which have no meaning. Pain then is not in space.
But neither does it belong to objective time; it temporalizes
itself, and it is in and through this temporalization that the
time of the world can appear. What then is this pain? Sim-
ply the translucent matter of consciousness, its being-there, .
its attachment to the world, in short the peculiar contingency
of the act of reading. The pain exists beyond all attention
and all knowledge since it slips into each act of attention
and of knowledge, since it is this very act in so far as the
act is without being the foundation of its being.
Yet even on this plane of pure being, pain as a contin-
gent attachment to the world can be existed non-thetically by
consciousness only if it is surpassed. Pain-consciousness is
an internal negation of the world; but ’ at the same time it
exists its pam — i.e., itself — as a wrenching nway from self.
Pure pain as the simple “lived” can hot be reached; it be-
longs to the category of indefinables -and indescribables which
are what they are. But pain-consciousness is a project toward
a further consciousness which would be empty of all pain;
that is, to a consciousness whose contexture, whose being-
^ere would be not painful.- This lateral escape, this wrench-
ing away from self which characterizes pain-consciousness
does not for all that constitute pain as a psychic object. It is
a non-thetic project of the For-itself; we apprehend it only
through the world. For example, it is given in the way in
which the book appears as “about to be read in a hurried,
jerl^ rhythm” where the words press against each other in
an infernal, fixed round, where the whole universe is pierced
with anxiety. In addition — and this is the unique character
of-cpiporal existence — ^the inexpressible which one wishes to
ee- IS rediscovered at the heart of this very wrenching away;
THE BODY
439
it is this which is going to constitute the consciousnesses
which surpass it; it is the very contingency and the being of
the flight which wishes to flee it. Nowhere else shall we
come closer to touching that nihilation of the In-itself by
the For-itself and that apprehension of the For-itself by the
-In-itself which nourishes the very nihilation.
Granted, someone may say. But you are weighting the
scales by choosing a case where pain is specifically pain in a
functioning organ, pain in the eye while it is looking, in the
hand while it is grasping. But I can suffer from a wound in
my finger while I am reading. In this case it would be diffi-
cult to maintain that my pain is the very contingency of my
“act of reading.”
Let us note first that no matter how absorbed I am in my
reading, I do not for all that cease making the world come
into being. Better yet, my reading is an act which implies in
its very nature the existence of the world as' a necessary
ground. This certainly does not mean that I have a weaker
consciousness of the world but that I am conscious of it as
a ground. I do not lose sight of the colors, the movements
which surround me, I do not cease to hear sounds; they are
simply lost in the undifferentiated totality which serves as
the background for my reading. Correlatively my body does
not cease to be indicated by the world as the total point of
view on mundane totality, but it is the world as ground which
indicates it. Thus my body does not cease to be existed in
totality as it is the total contingency of my consciousness.
It is what the totality of the world as ground indicates, and at
the same tinSe it is the totality which I exist affectively in
connection with the objective apprehension of the world. But
to the extent that a particular this detaches itself as figure on
the ground of the world, it correlatively points toward a
functional specification of the corporal totality, and by the
same stroke my consciousness exists a corporal form which
arises on the body-as-totality which it exists. The book is
read, and to the extent that I exist and that I surpass the con-
tingency of vision — or if you prefer of reading — the eyes
appear as figure on the ground of the corporal totality. On
this plane of existence the eyes certainly are not the sensory
organ seen by the Other but rather the very contexture of my
consciousness of seeing inasmuch as this consciousness is a
structure of my larger consciousness of the world. To be con-
scious is always to be conscious of the world, and the world
440 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
and body are always present to my consciousness although in
different ways. But this total consciousness of the world is
consciousness of the world as ground for a particular this;
thus just as consciousness specifies itself in its very act of ni-
hilation, there is the presence of a particular structure of the
body on the total ground of corporeality. When I am in the
process of reading, I do not cease to be a body seated in a
particular armchair three yards from the window under
given conditions of pressure and temperature. And I do not
cease to exist this pain in my left index finger any more than
I cease to exist my body in general. However I exist the pain
in such a way that it disappears in the ground of corporeality
as a structure subordinated to the corporal totality. The pain
is neither absent nor unconscious; it simply forms a part of
that distanceless existence of positional consciousness for it-
self. If a little later I turn the pages of the book, the pain in
my finger, without becoming thereby- an object of knowledge,
will pass to the rank of existed contingency as a figure on a
new organization of my body as the total groxmd of contin-
gency. Moreover these statements are in agreement with
the empirical observation that this is because it is easier when
reading to “be distracted” from a pain in the finger or in the
lower back than from pain in the eyes. For pain in the eyes
is precisely my reading, and the words which I read refer
me to it every instant, whereas the pain in my finger or back
is the apprehension of the world as ground and hence is
itself lost as a partial structure in the body as the fundamen-
tal apprehension of the ground of the world.
But now suppose that I suddenly cease to read and am at
present absorbed in apprehending my pain. This means that
I direct a reflective consciousness on my present conscious-
ness-as-vision. Thus the actual texture of my consciousness
reflected-on — in particular my pain — ^is apprehended and
posited by my reflective consciousness. We inust recall here
what we said concerning reflection: it is a total grasp with-
out a point of view; it is a knowledge which overflows it-
self and which tends to be objectivized, to project the known
at a distance so as to be able to contemplate it and to think
it The first movement of reflection is therefore to transcend
the pure quality of consciousness in pain toward a pain-as-
object Thus if we restrict ourselves to what we have called
an accessory reflection, reflection tends to make of pain some-
thing psychic.
THE BODY
441
The psychic object apprehended throng pain is illness.
This object has all the characteristics of pain, but it is tran-
scendent and passive. It is a reality which has its own time,
not the time of the external universe nor that of conscious-
ness, but psyctdc time. The /psychic object can then support
evaluations and various determinations. As such it is distinct
even from consciousness and appears through it; it remains
permanent while consciousness develops, and it is this very
permanence which is the condition of the opacity and the
passivity of illness. But on the other hand, this illness in
so far as it is apprehended through consciousness has all
the characteristics of unity, interiority, and spontaneity which
consciousness possesses — ^but in degraded form. This degra-
dation confers psychic individuality upon it. That is, first
of all, the illness has an absolute cohesion without parts.
In addition it has its own duration since it is outside con-
sciousness and possesses a past and a future. But this
duration, which is only the projection of the original tem-
poralization, is a multiplicity of interpenetration. The ill-
ness is “penetrating,” “caressing,” etc. And these charao
teristics aim only at rendering the way in which this illness
is outlined in duration; they are melodic qualities. A pain
which is given in tvidnges followed by lulls is not appre-
hended by reflection as the pure alteration of painful
and non-painful consciousness. For organizing reflec-
tion the brief respites are a part of the illness just as
silences are a part of a melody. The ensemble constitutes the
rhythm and the behavior of the illness. JBut at the same time
that it is a passive object, illness as it is seen through an ab-
solute spontaneity which is consciousness, is a projection of
this spontaneity into the In-itself. As a passive spontaneity
it is magical; it is ^ven as extending itself, as entirely the
master of its temporal form. It appears and disappears dif-
ferently than spatial-temporal objects. If I no longer see the
table, this is because I have turned my head, but if I no long-
er feel my illness, it is because it “has left.” In fact there
is produced here a phenomenon analogous to that which psy-
chologists of form call the stroboscopic illusion. The dis-
appearance of the illness by frustrating the projects of the
reflective for-itself is given as a movement of withdrawal, al-
442
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
most as wHl. There is an animism of illness; it is given as a
living thing which has its form, its own duration, its
habits. The sick maintain a sort of intimacy with it. When it
appears, it is not as a new phenomenon; it is, the sick man
will say, “my afternoon crisis.” Thus reflection does not join
together the moments of the same crisis, but passing over an
entire day it links the crises together. Nevertheless this syn-
thesis of recognition has a special character; it does not aim
at constituting an object which would remain existing even
when it would not be given to consciousness (in the manner
of a hate which remains “dormant” or stays “in the uncon-
scious”). In fact when the illness goes away it disappears for
good. “Nothing is left of it” But the curious consequence
follows that when the illness reappears, it rises up in its very
passivity by a sort of spontaneous generation. For example,
one can feel its “gentle overtures.” It is “coming back again.”
“This is it.” Thus the first pains just like the rest are not ap-
prehended for themselves as a simple, bare texture of the con-
sciousness refiected-on; they are the “announcements” of the
illness or rather the illness itself which is bom slowly — ^like
a locomotive which gradually gets under way. On the other
hand it is very necessary to understand that I constitute the
illness with the pain. This does not mean that I apprehend
the illness as the cause of the pain but rather that each con-
crete pain is like a note in a melody: it is at once the whole
melody and a “moment” in the melody. Across each pain
I apprehend the entire illness and yet it transcends them all,
for it is the synthetic totality of all the pains, the theme
which is developed by them and through them. But the mat-
ter of the illness does not resemble that of a. melody. In
the first place it is something purely lived; there is no dis-
tance between the consciousness reflected-on and the pain
nor between the reflective consciousness and the consciousness
reflected-on. The result is that the illness is transcendent but
without distance. It is outside my consciousness as a syn-
thetic totality and already close to being elsewhere. But
on the other hand it is in my consciousness, it fastens on to
consciousness with all its teeth, penetrates consciousness with
all its notes; and these teeth, these notes are my consciousness.
What has become of the body on this level? There has
been, we noted, a sort of scission from the moment of the
reflective projection; for the unreflective consciousness pain
was the body; for the reflective consciousness the illness is
THE BODY
443
distinct from the body, it has its own form, it comes and
goes. On the reflective level where we are taking our posi-
tion — ue., before the intervention of the for-others — ^the
body is not explicitly and thematically given to consciousness.
The reflective consciousness is consciousness of the illness.
However while the illness has a form which is peculiar to it
and a melodic rhythm which confers on it a transcending
individuality, it adheres to the for-itself by means of its mat-
ter since it is revealed through the pain and as the unity of
all my pains of the same type. The illness is mine in this sense
that I give to it its matter. I apprehend it as sustained and
nourished by a certain passive environment in which the
passivity is precisely the projection into the in-itself of the
contingent facticity of the pains. It is my passivity. This pas-
sive environment is not apprehended for itself except as the
matter of the statue is apprehended when I perceive its form,
and yet it is there. The illness feeds on this passivity and
magically derives new strength from it just as Antaeus was
nourished by the earth. It is my body on a new plane of
existence; that is, as the pure noematic correlate of a reflective
consciousness. We shall caU it a psychic body. It is not yet
known in any way, for the reflection which seeks to appre-
hend the pain-consciousness is not yet cognitive. This con-
sciousness is affectivity in its original upsurge. It apprehends
the illness as an object but as an affective object. One di-
rects oneself first toward one’s pain so as to hate it, to
endure it with patience, to apprehend it as unbearable, some-
times to love it, to rejoice in it (if it foretells a release, a
cure), to evaluate it in some way. Naturally it is the illness
which is evaluated or rather which rises up as the necessary
correlate of the evaluation. The illness is therefore not known;
it is suffered, .BXid similarly the body is revealed by the illness
and is likewise suffered by consciousness. In order to add
cognitive structures to the body as it has been given to reflec-
tion, we. win have to resort to the Other. We can not discuss
this point at present, for it is necessary first to bring to light
the structures of the body-for-others.
_ At present, however, we can note that this psychic body,
since it is the projection on the plane of the in-itself of the
intra-contexture of consciousness, provides the implicit mat-
ter df all the phenomena of tiie psyche. Just as the original
body was existed by each consciousness as its own contingen-
cy, so the psychic body is suffered as the contingency of hate
444 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
or of love, of acts and qualities, but this contingency has a
new character. In so far as it was existed by consciousness it
was the recapture of consciousness by the in-itself; in so far
as it is suffered by reflection in the illness or the hate or the
enterprise, it is projected into the in-itself. Hence it repre-
sents the tendency of each psychic object beyond its magical
cohesion to be parcelled out in exteriority; it represents be-
yond the magical relations which unite psychic objects to
each other, the tendency of each one of them to be isolated
in an insularity of indifference. It is therefore a sort of im-
plicit space supporting the melodic duration of the psychic.
In so far as the body is the contingent and indifferent mat-
ter of all our psychic events, the body determines a psychic
space. This space has neither high nor low, neither left
nor right; it is without parts inasmuch as the magical co-
hesion of the psychic comes to combat its tendency toward
a division in indifference. This is nonetheless a real charac-
teristic of the psyche — ^not that the psyche is united to a body
but that under its melodic organization the body is its sub-
stance and its perpetual condition of possibility. It is this
which appears as soon as we name the psychic. It is this
which is at the basis of the mechanistic and chemical meta-
phors which we use to classify and to explain the events of
the psyche. It is this which we aim at and which we form
into images (image-making consciousnesses) which we pro-
duce in order to aim at absent feelings and make them
present. It is this, finally, which motivates and to some de-
gree justifies psychological theories like that of the uncon-
scious, problems like that of the preservation of memories.
It goes without saying that we have chosen physical pain
for the sake of an example and that there are thousands of
other ways, themselves contingent, to exist our contingency.
In particular we must note that when no pain, no specific
satisfaction or dissatisfaction is “existed” by consciousness,
Ihe for-itself does not thereby cease to project itself be-
yond a contingency which is pure and so to speak unquali-
fied. Consciousness does not cease “to have” a body. Coen-
esthetic affectivity is then a pure, non-positional apprehen-
sion of a contingency without color,' a pure apprehension of
the self as a factual existence. This perpetual apprehension
on the part of my for-itself of an insipid taste which I can
not place, which accompanies me even in my efforts to get
away from it, and which is my taste — this is what we have
THE BODY
445
described elsewhere under the name of Nausea. A dull and
inescapable nausea perpetually reveals my body to my con-
sciousness. Sometimes we look for the pleasant or for physical
pain to free ourselves from this nausea; but as soon as the
pain and the pleasure are existed by consciousness, they in
turn manifest its facticity and its contingency; and it is on
the ground of this nausea that they are revealed. We must not
take the term nausea as a metaphor derived from our phys-
iological disgust. On the contrary, we must realize lhat it is
on the foundation of this nausea that all concrete and em-
pirical nauseas (nausea caused by spoiled meat, fresh blood,
excrement, etc.) are produced and make us vomit.
n. THE BODY-FOR-OTHERS
We have just described the being of my body for~me. On
this ontological plane my body is such as we have described
it and it is only that. It would be useless to look there for
traces of a physiological organ, of an anatomical and spatial
constitution. Either it is the center of reference indicated
emptily by the instrumental-objects of the world or else it is
the contingency which the for-itself exists. More exactly,
these two modes of being are complementary. But the body
knows the same avatars as the for-itself; it has other planes
of existence. It exists also for-others. We must now study
it in this new ontological perspective. To study the way in
which my body appears to the Other or the way in which
the Other’s body appears to me amounts to the same thing.
In fact we have established diat the structures of my being-
for-the-Other are identical to those of the Other’s being-for-
me. It is then in terms of the Other’s being-for-me that —
for the sake of convenience — we shall establish the nature
of the body-for-others (that is, of the Other’s body) .
We showed in the preceding chapter that the body is not
that which first manifests the Other to me. In fact if the
fundamental relation of my being to that of the Other were
reduced to the relation of my body to the Other’s body, it
would be a purely external relation. But my connection with
the Other is inconceivable if it is not an internal negation.
I must apprehend the Other first as the one for whom I
exist as an object; the reapprehension of ray selfness causes
the Other to appear as an object in a second moment of pre-
446 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
historic historization. The appearance of tlic Other’s body i
not therefore the primary encounter; on the contrary, it i;
only one episode in my relations with tlic Other and h
particular in what we have described as making an objec!
of the Otlier. Or if you prefer, the Otlier exists for me firs
and I apprehend him in his body subsequently. Tlic Other’s
body is for me a secondary structure.
In the fundamental phenomenon of making an object oj
the Other, he appears to me as a transcendence-transcended
That is, by the mere fact that I project myself toward mj
possibilities, I surpass and transcend the Other’s transcen-
dence. It is put out of play; it is a transcendencc-as-object 3
apprehend this transcendence in the world, and originally,
as a certain arrangement of the instrumental-things of my
world inasmuch as they indicate in addition a secondary cen-
ter of reference which is in the midst of the world and
which is not me. These indications — unlike the indications
which indicate me — are not constitutive of the indicating
thing; they are lateral properties of the object The Other,
as we have seen, can not be a constitutive concept of the
world. These indications all have therefore an original con-
tingency and the character of an event. But the center of
reference which they indicate is indeed the Other as a tran-
scendence simply contemplated or transcended. The secondary
arrangement of objects refers me to the Other as to the or-
ganizer or to the beneficiary of this arrangement, in short
to an instrument which disposes of instruments in view of
an end which it itself produces. But in turn I surpass this
end and utilize it; it is in the midst of the world and I can
make use of it for my own ends. Thus the Other is at first
indicated by things as an instrument. Things also indicate
me too as an instrument, and I am a body precisely in so far
as I make myself be indicated by things. Therefore it is the
Other-as-body whom things indicate by their lateral and
secondary arrangements. The fact is that I actually do not
know instruments which do not refer secondarily to the
Other's body
^ Earlier we pointed out that I could not take any point of
view on my body in so far as it was designated by things.
The body is, in fact, the point of view on which I can take
no point of view, the instrument which I can not utilize in
the way I utilize any other instrument. When by means of
universalizing thought I tried to think of my body emptily
THE BODY
447
as a pure instrument in the midst of the world, the imme-
diate result was the collapse of the world as such. On the
other hand, because of the mere fact that 1 am not the Oth-
er, his body appears to me originally as a point of view on
which I can take a point of view, an instrument which I
can utilize with other instruments. The Other’s body is in-
dicated by the round of instrumental-things, but in turn it
indicates other objects; finally it is integrated with my
world, and it indicates my body. Thus the Other’s body is
radically different from my body-for-me; it is the tool which
I am not and which I utilize (or which resists me, which
amounts to the same thing). It is presented to me originally
with a certain objective coefficient of utility and of adversity.
The Other’s body is therefore the Other himself as a tran-
scendence-instrument.
These same remarks apply to the Other’s body as the syn-
thetic ensemble of sense organs. We do not discover in and
through the Other’s body the possibility which the Other
has of knowing us. This is revealed fundamentally in and
through my being-as-object for the Other; that is, it is the
essential structure of our original relation with the Other.
And in this original relation the flight of my world toward
the Other is equally given. By the reapprehension of my
selfness I transcend the Other’s transcendence inasmuch as
this transcendence is the permanent possibility of appre-
hending myself as an object. Due to this fact it becomes a
purely given transcendence surpassed toward my own goals,
a transcendence which simply “is-there,” and the knowledge
which the Other has of me and of the world becomes knowl-
edge-as-amobject. This means that it is a given property of
the Other, a property which in turn I can know. In truth
this knowledge which I get of it remains empty in this sense
ffiat I shall never know the act of knowing; this act, since
It is pure transcendence, can be apprehended only by itself
m the form of non-thetic consciousness or by the reflection
issumg from it. What I know is only knowledge as being-
there or. if you like, the being-there of knowledge. Thus
this relativity of the sensory organ which is revealed to my
universalizing reason but which can not be thought, so far
as my own sense is concerned, without determining the col-
lapse of the world — ^this I apprehend first when I apprehend
the Other-as-object. I apprehend it without danger; for
smce the Other forms part of my universe, his relativity
448
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
can not determine the collapse of this universe. The senses
of the Other are senses known as knowing.
We can see here the explanation of the error of psychol-
ogists who define my senses by the Other’s senses and who
give to the sense organ as it is for me a relativity which be-
longs to its being-for-others. We can see also how this er-
ror becomes truth if we place it on its proper level of being
after we have determined the true order of being and of
knowmg. Thus the objects of my world indicate laterally
an object-center-of-reference which is the Other. But this
center in turn appears to me from a point-of-view-without
a-point-of-view which is mine, which is my body or my
contingency. In short, to employ an inaccurate but common
expression, 1 know the Other through the senses. Just as
the Other is the instrument which I utilize in the manner
of the instrument which I am and which no instrument can -
any longer utilize, so he is the ensemble of sense organs
which are revealed to my sense knowledge; that is, he is a
facticity which appears to a facticity. Thus there can be in
its true place m the order of knowing and of being, a study
of the Other’s sense organs as they are known through the
senses by me. This study will attach the greatest importance
to the function of these sense organs — which is to know*
But this knowledge in turn will be a pure object for me;
here, for example, belongs the false problem of “inverted
vision.” In reality the sensory organ of the Other originally
is in no way an instrument of knowledge for him; it is sim-
ply the Other’s knowledge, his pure act of knowing in so
far as this knowledge exists in the mode of an object in my
universe.
Nevertheless we have as yet defined the Other’s body
only in so far as it is indicated laterally by the instrumental-
tlmgs of my universe. Actually this by no means gives us
his being-there in “flesh and blood.” To be sure, the Oth-
er’s body is everywhere present in the very indication which
instrumental-things give of it since they are revealed as
utilized by him and as known by him. This room in which
I wait for the master of the house reveals to me in its to-
tality the body of its owner; this easy chair is a chair-where-
he-sits, this desk is a desk-at-which-he-writes, this window
is a window through which there enters the light-which-
illuminates-the-objects-which-he-sees. Thus it is an outline
omplete with all its parts, and this outline is an outline-of-
THE BODY
449
an-object; an -object can come at every instant to fill the out-
line with content. But still the master of the house “is not
there.” He is elsewhere; he is absent.
Now we have seen that absence is a structure of being-
there. To be absent is to-be-elsewhere-in-my-world; it is to
be already given for me. As soon as I receive a letter from
my cousin in Africa, his being-elsewhere is concretely given
to me by the very indications of this letter, and this being-
elsewhere is a being-somewhere; it is already his body. We
can in no other way explain why a mere letter from a be-
loved woman sensually afl^ects her lover; all the body of the
beloved is present as an absence in these lines and on this
paper. But since the being-elsewhere is a being-there in
relation to a concrete ensemble of instrumental-things in a
concrete situation, it is already facticity and contingency. It
is not only the encounter which I had yesterday with Pierre
which de&es his contingency and mine; his absence yester-
day similarly defined our contingencies and our facticities.
And this facticity of the absent is implicitly given in these
instrumental-things which indicate it; his abrupt appearance
does not add anything. Thus the Other’s body is his facticity
as an instrument and as a synthesis of sense organs as it is
revealed to my facticity. It is given to me as soon as the
Other exists for me m the world; the presence or absence of
the Other changes nothing.
But look! Now Pierre appears. He is entering my room.
This appearance changes no thin g in the fundament^ struc-
ture of my relation to him; it is contingency but so was his
absence contingency. Objects indicate him to me: the door
which he pushes indicates a human presence when it opens
before him, the same with the chair when he sits down, etc.
But the objects did not cease to indicate him during his
absence. Of course I exist for him, he speaks to me. But I
existed equally yesterday when he sent me that telegram,
which is now on my table, to tell me of his coming. Yet
there is something new. This is the fact that he appears at
present on the ground of the world as a this which I can
look at, apprehend, and utilize directly. What does this
mean? First of all, the facticity of the Other — ^that is, the
contingency of his being — ^is now explicit instead of being
implicitly contained in the lateral indications of instrumental-
things. This facticity is precisely what the Other exists — in
and through his for-itself; it is what the Other perpetually
450 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
lives in nausea as a non-positional apprehension of a con*
tingency which he is, as a pure apprehension of self as a
factual existence. In a word, it is his cocnesthesia, 'Hie
Other’s appearance is the revelation of the taste of his being
as an immediate existence. I, however, do not grasp this
taste as he does. Nausea for him is not knowledge; it is the
non-thetic apprehension of the contingency which he is.
It is the surpassing of this contingency toward the unique
possibilities of the for-itself. It is an existed contingency,
a contingency submitted to and refused. It is this same con-
tingency, and no other, which I presently grasp. But I am
not this contingency. I surpass it toward my own possibili-
ties, but this surpassing is the transcendence of an Other.
It is given to me in entirety and without appeal; it is irre-
mediable. The Other’s for-itself wrenches itself away from
this contingency and perpetually surpasses it. But in so far
as I transcend the Other’s transcendence, I fix it. It is no
longer a resource against facticity; quite the contrary, it par-
ticipates in turn in facticity, it emanates from facticity. Thus
nothing comes to interpose itself between the Other’s pure
contingency as a taste for himself and my consciousness.
Indeed I apprehend this taste as it is existed. However,
from the very fact of my otherness, this taste appears as a
known and given this in the midst of the world. This body
of the Other is given to me as the pure in-itself of his being
— an in-itself among in-itselfs and one which I surpass to-
ward my possibilities. This body of the Other is revealed
therefore with two equally contingent characteristics: it is
here and could be elsewhere; that is, instrumental-things
could be arranged otherwise in relation to it, could indicate
it otherwise; the distance between the chair and this body
could be different; the body is like this and could be other-
■^ise — i.e., I grasp its original contingency in the form of
an objective and contingent configuration. But in reality,
these two characteristics are only one. 'The second only makes
the first present, only makes it explicit for me. 'This body of
the Other is the pure fact of the Other’s presence in my
world as a being-there which is expressed by a being-as-this.
Thus the Other’s very existence as the Other-for-me implies
that he is revealed as a tool possessing the property of know-
ing and that this property of knowing is bound to some
objective existence. This is what we shall call the necessity
for the Other to be contingent for me.
THE BODY
451
From the moment that there is an Other, it must be con-
cluded that he is ^ instrument provided with certain sense
organs. But these considerations only serve to show the ab-
stract necessity for the Other to have a body. This body of the
Other as I encounter it is the revelation as object-for-me of the
contingent form assumed by the necessity of this contingency.
Every Other must have sense organs but not necessarily
these sense organs, not any particular face and finally not
this face. But face, sense organs, presence — all that is
nothing but the contingent form of the Other’s necessity to
exist himself as belonging to a race, a class, an environment,
etc., in so far as this contingent form is surpassed by a tran-
scendence which does not have to exist it. What for the Other
is his taste of himself becomes for me the Other*s flesh. The
flesh is the pure contingency of presence. It is ordinarily hid-
den by clothes, make-up, the cut of the hair or beard, the ex-
pression, etc. But in the course of long acquaintance with a
person there always comes an instant when all these disguises
are thrown off and when I find myself in the presence of the
pure contingency of his presence. In this case I achieve
in the face or the other parts of a body the pure intuition of
the flesh. This intuition is not only knowledge; it is the
affective apprehension of an absolute contingency, and this
apprehension is a particular type of nausea.
The Other’s body is then the facticity of transcendence
transcended as it refers to my facticity. I never apprehend
the Other as body without at the same time in a non-explicit
manner apprehending my body as the center of reference in-
dicated by the Other. But all the same we can not perceive the
Other’s body as flesh, as if it were an isolated object having
purely external relations with other thises. That is true only
for a corpse. The Other’s body as flesh is immediately given
as the center of reference in a situation which is synthetically
organized around it, and it is inseparable from this Situation.'
Therefore we should not ask how the Other’s body can be
first body for me and subsequently enter into a situation. The
Other is originally given to me as a body in situation. There-
fore there is not, for example, first a body and later action.
But the body is the objective contingency of the Other’s aC'
tion. Thus once again we find on another plane an ontolog-
ical necessity which we pointed out in connection with the
existence of my body for me: the contingency of the for-
itself, we said, can be existed only in and through a tran-
452
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
scendence; it is the rcapprchension — perpetually surpassed
and perpetually rcapprehending — of the for-itself, the re-
apprehension of the for-itself by the in-itself on the ground
of the primary nihilation. Similarly here the Other’s body
as flesh can not be inserted into a situation preliminarily
defined. The Other’s body is precisely that in terms of
which there is a situation. Here also it can exist only in
and through a transcendence. Now, however, this tran-
scendence is at the start transcended; it is itself an object
Thus Pierre’s body is not first a hand which could subse-
quently take hold of this glass; such a conception would tend
to put the corpse at the origin of the living body. But his
body is the complex hand-glass, since the flesh of the hand
marks the original contingency of this complex.
Far from the relation of the body to objects being a
problem, we never apprehend the body outside this relation.
Thus the Other’s body is meaningful Meaning is nothing
other than a fixed movement of transcendence. A body is
a body as this mass of flesh v/hich it is is defined by the
table which the body looks at, the chair in v/hich it sits,
the pavement on which it walks, etc. But to proceed fur-
ther, there could be no question of exhausting the meanings
which constitute the body — ^by means of reference to con-
certed actions, to the rational utilization of instrumental-com-
plexes. The body is the totality of meaningful relations to the
world. In this sense it is defined also by reference to the air
which it breathes, to the water which it drinks, to the food
which it cats. The body in fact could not appear without sus-
taining meaningful relations with the totality of what is. Like
action, life is a transcended transcendence and a meaning.
There is no difference in nature betv/cen action and life con-
ceived as a totality. Life represents the ensemble of meanings
which arc transcended toward objects which are not posit^
as thises on the ground of the world. Life is the Other’s
body-as-ground in contrast to the body-as-figure inasmuch
as this body-as-ground can be apprehended, not by the
Other’s for-itself and as something implicit and non-posi-
tional, but precisely, explicitly, and objectively by me. His
body appears then as a meaningful figure on the ground
of the universe but without ceasing to be a ground for the
Other and precisely as a ground. But here we should make
an important distinction*, the Other’s body actually appears
to my body.” This means that there is a facticity in my
THE BODY
, . 453
point of view on the Other. In this sense we must not con- ,
fuse my possibility of apprehending an organ (an arm, a
hand) on the ground of the corporal totality and, on the other
hand, my explicit apprehension of the Other’s body or of cer-
tain structures of this body in so far as they are lived by the
Other as the body-as-ground. It is only in the second case that
we apprehend the Other as life. In the first instance it can
happen that we apprehend as ground that which is figure for
him. When I look at his hand, the rest of his body is
united into ground. But it is perhaps his forehead or his
thorax which for him exists non-thetically as figure on a
ground in which his arms and his hands are dissolved.
The result, of course, is that the being of the Other’s
body is for me a synthetic totality. This means: (1) I can
never apprehend the Other’s body except in terms of a total
situation which indicates it. (2) I can not perceive any organ
of the Other’s body in isolation, and I always cause each
single organ to be indicated to me in terms of the totality of
the flesh or of life. Thus my perception of the Other’s body
is radically different from my perception of things.
(1) The Other moves within limits which appear in im-
mediate connection with his movements and which are the
terms within which I cause the meaning of these movements
to be indicated to myself. These limits are both spatial and
temporal. Spatially it is the glass placed at a distance from
Pierre which is the meaning of his actual gesture. Thus in my
perception of the ensemble “table-glass-bottle, etc.,” I go to
the movement of the arm in order to make known to myself
what it is. If the arm is visible and if the glass is hidden, I
perceive Pierre’s movement in terms of thfe pure idea of situa-
tion and iu terms of the goal aimed at emptily beyond the
objects which hide the glass from me, and this is the meaning
of the gesture.
Pierre’s gesture which is revealed to me in the present I
always apprehend temporally from the standpoint of the fu-
ture goals toward which he is reaching. Thus I make known
to myself the present of the body by means of its future and
still more generally, by means of the future of the world. We
shall never be able to understand anything about the psy-
chological problem of the perception of the Other’s body if
we do not grasp, first this essential truth — that the Other’s
body is perceived wholly differently than other bodies: for in
order to perceive it we ^ways move to it from what is outside
454 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
of it, in space and in time; we apprehend its gesture “against
the current” by a sort of inversion of time and space. To
perceive the Other is to make known to oneself what he is by
means of the world.
(2) I never perceive an arm raised alongside a motionless
body. I perceive Pierre-who-raises-his-hand. This does not
mean that by an act of judgmeilt I relate the movement of the
hand to a “consciousness” which instigated it; rather I can
apprehend the movement of the hand or of the arm only as a
temporal structure of the whole body. Here it is the whole
which determines the order and the movement of its parts. In
order to prove that we are dealing here with an original per-
ception of the Other’s body, we need only recall the horror
we feel if we happen to see an arm which looks “as if it did
not belong to any body,” or we may recall any one of those
rapid perceptions in which we see, for example, a hand (the
arm of which is hidden) crawl like a spider up the length
of the doorway. In such cases there is a disintegration of the
body, and this disintegration is apprehended as extraordinary.
In addition, we know the positive proofs the Gestalt psy-
chology has often advanced. It comes as a shock when a
photograph registers an enormous enlargement of Pierre’s
hands as he holds them forward (because the camera grasps
them in their own dimension and without synthetic connec-
tion with the corporal totality), for we' perceive that these
same hands appear without enlargement if we look at them
with the naked eye. In this sense the body appears within the
limits of the situation as a synthetic totality of life and action.
Following these observations, it is evident that Pierre’s
body is in no way to be' distinguished from Pierre-for-me. The
Other’s body wi^ its various meanings exists only for me: to
be an object-for-others or to-be-a-body are two ontological
modalities which are strictly equivalent expressions of the
being-for-others on the part of the for-itself. Thus the mean-
ings do not refer to a mysterious psychism; they are this
psychism in so far as it is a transcendence-transcended. Of
course there is a psychic cryptography; certain phenomena
we “hidden.” But this certainly does not mean that the mean-
ings refer to something “beyond the body.” They refer to
the world and to themselves. In particular these emotional
manifestations or, more generally, the phenomena erroneously
called the phenomena of ' expression, by no means indicate to
us a hidden affection lived by some psychism which would be
THE BODY
455
the immaterial object of the research of the psychologist.
These frowns, this redness, tliis stammering, this slight trem-
bling of tlie hands, these downcast looks which seem at once
timid and threatening — these do not express anger; they arc
the anger. But this point must be clearly understood. In itself
a clenched fist is nothing and means nothing. But also we
never perceive a clenched fist. We perceive a man who in a
certain situation clenches his fist. This meaningful act con-
sidered in connection with the past and with possibles and
understood in terms of the synthetic totality “body in situa-
tion” is the anger. It refers to nothing other than to actions
in tlie world (to strike, insult, etc.); that is, to new meaning-
ful attitudes of the body. We can not get away from the fact
that the “psychic object” is entirely released to perception
and is inconceivable outside corporc^ structures.
If this fact has not been taken into account Iiithcrto or if
those who have supported it, like the Behaviorists, have not
themselves very well understood what they wanted to say
and have shocked the world with their pronouncements, tliis
is because people too readily believe that all perceptions arc
of the same kind. Actually perception must release to us
immediately the spatial-temporal object Its fundamental
structure is the internal negation, and it releases to me the
object as it is, not as an empty image of some reality beyond
reach. But precisely for this reason a new structure of percep-
tion corresponds to each t>’pe of reality. Tlie body is the psy-
chic object par excellence — the only psychic object. But if we
consider that the body is a transcended transcendence, then
the perception of it can not by nature be of the same type
as that of inanimate objects. We must not understand by tliis
that tlie perception is progressively enriched but that origi-
nally it is of another structure. Thus it is not necessary to
resort to habit or reason by analogy in order to explain
how we understand expressive conduct, Tliis conduct is
originally released to perception as understandable; its mean-
ing is part of its being just as the color of the paper is part
of the being of the paper. It is therefore no more necessary to
refer to other conduct in order to understand a particular con-
duct tlian to refer to the color of the table, or of another paper
or of foliage in order to perceive tlie color of the folio
which is placed before me.**
* Tr. H Sartre did not intend to pun on Uic word? {fulUafc -nd fritS'.lf,
then I apolorirc for my feeble ettempt with **foIia£c’* end ‘•/cho."
456
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
The Other’s body, however, is given to xis immediately as
what the Other is. In this sense we apprehend it as that
which is perpetually surpassed toward an end by each par-
ticular meaning. Take for example a man who is walking.
From the start I understand this walking in terms of a spa-
tial-temporal ensemble (alley-street-sidewalk-shops-cars, etc.)
in which certain structures represent the meaning-to-come of
the walking. I perceive this walking by going from the fu-
ture to the present — although the future which is in ques-
tion belongs to universal time and is a pure “now”
which is not yet. The walking itself, a pure, inapprehensible,
and nihilating becoming, is the present. But this present is
a surpassing toward a future go^ on the part of something
which is walking; beyond the pure and inapprehensible pres-
ent of the movement of the arm we attempt to grasp the
substratum of the movement. This substratum, which we
never apprehend as it is except in the corpse, is yet always
there as the surpassed, the past. When I speak of an arm-
in-motion, I consider this arm which was at rest as the sub-
stance of the motion. We pointed out in Part Two that such
a conception can not be supported. What moves can not be
the motionless arm; motion is a disorder of being. It is none-
theless true that the psychic movement refers to two limits
— ^the future terminus of its result, and the past terminus —
the motionless organ which it alters and surpasses. I per-
ceive the movement-of-the-arm as a perpetual, inapprehensi-
ble reference toward a past-being. This past-being (the arm,
the leg, the whole body at rest) I do not see at ^1; I can
never catch sight of it except through the movement which
surpasses it and to which I am a presence — ^just as one gets a
glimpse of a pebble at the bottom of the stream through Ae
movement of the water. Yet this immobility of being which
is always surpassed and never realized, to which I perpetu-
ally refer in order to say what is in motion — ^this is pure
facticity, pure -flesh, the pure in-itself as the past of a
transcended transcendence which is perpetually being made
past.
This pure in-itself, which exists only by virtue of being
surpassed and in and through this surpassing, falls to the
level of the corpse if it ceases to be simultaneously revealed
and hidden by the transcendence-transcended. As a corpse—^
i.e., as the pure past of a life, as simply the remains — -it is
still truly understandable orfy in terms of the surpassing
THE BODY
457
which no longer surpasses it: it is that which has been sur-
passed toward situations perpetually renewed. On the other
hand, in so far as it appears at present as a pure in-itself, it
exists in relation to other “thises” in the simple relation of
indifferent exteriority: the corpse is no longer in situation.
At the same time it collapses into itself in a multiplicity of
sustaining beings, each maintaining purely external relations
with the others. The study of exteriority, which always im-
plies facticity since this exteriority is never perceptible ex-
cept on the corpse, is anatomy, 'l^e synthetic reconstitution
of the living person from the standpoint of corpses is physi-
ology. From the outset physiology is condemned to under-
stand nothing of life since it conceives life simply as a par-
ticular modality of death, since it sees the infinite divisibility
of the corpse as primary, and since it does not know the
synthetic unity of the “surpassing towards” for which in-
cite divisibility is the pure and simple past. Even the study
of life in the living person, even vivisection, even the study of
the life of protoplasm, even embryology or the study of the
egg can not rediscover life; the organ which is observed
is living but it is not established in the synthetic unity of
a particular life; it is understood in terms of anatomy —
i.e., in terms of death. There is therefore an enormous error
in believing that the Other’s body, which is originally re-
vealed to us, is the body of anatomical-physiology. The fault
here is as serious as that of confusing our senses “for our-
selves” with our sensory orgjins for others. The Other’s body
is the facticity of the transcendence-transcended as this factic-
ity is perpetually a birth; that is, as it refers to the indifferent
exteriority of an in-itself perpetually surpassed.
These considerations enable us to explain what is called
character. It should be noted in fact that character has dis-
tinct existence only in the capacity of an object of knowl-
edge for the Other. Consciousness does not know its own
character — unless in determining itself reflectively from the
standpoint of another’s point of view. It exists its character
in pure indistinction non-thematically and non-thetically
in the proof which it effects of its own contingency and in
the nihilation by which it recognizes and surpasses its fac-
ticity. This is why pure introspective self-description does
not give, us character. Proust’s hero “does not have” a di-
rectly apprehensible character; he is presented first as being
conscious of himself as an ensemble of general reactions
458
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
common to all men (“mechanisms” of passion, emotions, a
certain order of memories, etc.) in which each man can
recognize himself. This is because these reactions belong to
the general “nature” of the psychic. K (as Abraham attempt-
ed in his book on Proust) we succeed in determining the
character of Proust’s hero (for example, his weakness, his
passivity, his particular way of linking love and money),
this is because we are interpreting brute givens. We adopt
an external point of view regarding them;, we compare them
and we attempt to disengage from them permanent, objec-
tive relations. But this necessitates detachment. So long as
the reader using the usual optic process of reading identifies
himself with the hero of the novel, the character of “Marcel”
escapes him; better yet it does not exist on this level. It ap-
pears only if I break the complicity which unites me to the
writer, o^y if I consider the book no longer as a confidant
but as a confidence, still better as a document. This charac-
ter exists therefore only on the plane of the for-others, and
that is the reason why the teachings and the descriptions of
“psychological realists” (that is, those French authors who
have undertaken an objective, social psychology) are never
rediscovered in the lived experience of the subject.
But if character is essentially for others, it can not be dis-
tinguished from the body as we have described it. To sup-
pose, for example, that temperament is the cause of charac-
ter, that the “sanguine temperament” is the cause of irasci-
bility is to posit character as a psychic entity presenting all
the aspects of objectivity and yet subjective and suffered by
the subject. Actually the Other’s irascibility is known from
the outside and is from the start transcended by. my tran-
scendence. In this sense it is not to be distinguished from the
“sanguine temperament.” In both instances we apprehend
the apoplectic redness, the same corporeal aspects, but we
transcend these givens differently according to our projects.
We shall be dealing with temperament if we consider this
redness as the manifestation of the body-as-ground; that is,
by cutting all that binds it to the situation. If we try to un-
destand it in terms of the corpse, we shall be able to con-
duct a physiological and medical study of it. If on the con-
trary, we consider it by approaching it in terms of the global
situation, it will be anger itself or again a promise of anger,
or rather an anger in promise — that is, a permanent relation
with instrumental-things, a potentiality. Between tempera-
THE BODY
459
ment and character there is therefore only a difference of
principle, and character is identical with the body. This is
what justifies the attempts of numerous authors to instate a
physiognomy as the basis of the studies of character and in
particular the fine research of Kretschmer on character and
the structure of the body. The character of the Other, in
fact, is immediately given to intuition as a synthetic ensem-
ble. This does not mean that we can immediately describe it
It would take time to make the differentiated structures ap-
pear, to make explicit certain givens which we have imme-
diately apprehended affectively, to transform the global in-
distinction which is the Other’s body into organized form.
We can be deceived. It is permissible also to resort to gen-
eral and discursive knowledge (laws empirically or statis-
tically established in connection with other subjects) in or-
der to interpret what we see. But in any case the problem
will be only to make explicit and to organize the content of
our first intuition in terms of foresight and action. This is
without a doubt what is meant by people who insist that
“first impressions are not mistaken.” In fact from the mo-
ment of the first encounter the Other is given entirely and
immediately without any veil or mystery. Here to learn is to
understand, to develop, and to appreciate.
Nevertheless as the Other is thus given, he is given in
what he is. Character is not different from facticity — ^that
is, from original contingency. We apprehend the Other as
free, and we have demonstrated above that freedom is an
objective quality of the Other as the unconditioned power
of^ modifying situations. This power is not to be distin-
guished from that which originally constitutes the Other and _
which is the power to make a situation exist in general. In
fact, to be able to modify a situation is precisely to make a
situation exist. The Other’s objective freedom is only tran-
scendence-transcended; it is, as we have established, freedom-
as-object In this sense the Other appears as the one who
must be understood from the standpoint of a situation per-
petually modified. This is why his body is always the past.
In this sense the Other’s character is released to us as the
surpassed. Even irascibility as the promise of anger is al-
ways a surpassed promise. Thus character is given as the
Other’s facticity as it is accessible to my intuition but also
m so far as it is only in order to be surpassed. In this sense
to “get angry” is already to surpass the irascibility by the
460 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
very fact that one consents to it; it is to give irascibility a
meaning. Anger will appear tlicrcforc as the recovery of iras-
cibility by freedom-as-object. Tliis docs not mean that we are
hereby referred to a subjectivity but only that what we tran-
scend here is not only the Other’s facticity but his transcen-
dence, not his being (f.c., his past) but his present and his
future. Although the Other’s anger appears to me aUvays as a
free-anger (which is evident by tlic very fact that I pass judg-
ment on it) I can always transcend it — Lc., stir it up or
calm it down; better yet it is by transcending it and only by
transcending it Uiat I apprehend it Thus since the body is
the facticity of the transcendence-transcended, it is always
the body-which-points-beyond-itself; it is at once in space
(it is the situation) and in time (it is frecdom-as-ob]ect).
The body for-others is the magic object par excellence. Thus
the Other’s body is always “a body-morc-than-body” because
the Other is given to me totally and svithout intermediary
in the perpetual surpassing of its facticity. But this surpass-
ing does not refer me to a subjectivity; it is the objective
fact that the bod}' — ^whetlicr it be as organism, as character,
or as tool — never appears to me without surroundings, and
that the body must be determined in terms of these sur-
roundings, The Other’s body must not be confused with his
objectivity. The Other’s objectivity is his transcendence as
transcended. The body is the factidty of this transcendence.
But the Other’s corporeality and objectivity arc strictly in-
separable.
m. THE THIRD ONTOLOGICAL
DIMENSON OF THE BODY
I exist my body: this is its first dimension of being. My body
is utilized and knowm by the Other: this is its second di-
mension. But in so far as / an: for others, the Other is re-
vealed to me as the subject for whom I am an object. Even
there the question, as we have seen, is of my fundamental
relation with the Other. I exist therefore for myself as
known by the Other — ^in particular in my very facticity. I
e^st for myself as a body known by the Other. This is the
third ontological dimension of my body. This is what we
are going to study next; with it we shall have exhausted the
question of the body’s modes of being.
THE BODY
461
With tile appearance of the Other’s look I experience the
revelation of my being-as-object; that is, of my transcendence
as transcended. A me-as-object is revealed to me as an im-
knowable being, as the flight into an Other which I am with
full responsibility. But while I can not know or even con-
ceive of this “Me” in its reality, at least I am not without
apprehending certain of its formal structures. In particular
I feel myself touched by the Other in my factual existence;
it is my being-there-for-others for which I am responsible.
This being-there is precisely the body. Thus the encounter
with the Other does not only touch me in my transcendence:
in and through the transcendence which the Other surpasses,
the facticity which my transcendence nihilates and tran-
scends exists for the Other; and to the extent that I am
conscious of existing for the Other I apprehend my own fac-
ticity, not only in its non-thetic nihilation, not only in the
existent, but in its flight toward a being-in-the-midst-of-the-
world. The shock of the encounter with the Other is for me
a revelation in emptiness of the existence of my body outside
as an in-itself for the Other. Thus my body is not given
merely as that which is purely and simply lived; rather this
“lived experience” becomes — ^in and through the contingent,
absolute fact of the Other’s existence — extended outside in a
dimension of flight which escapes me. My body’s depth of
being is for me this peipetual “outside” of my most intimate
“inside.”
To the extent that the Other’s omnipresence is the funda-
mental fact, the objectivity of my being-there is a constant
dimension of my facticity; I exist my contingency in so far
as I surpass it toward my possibles and in so far as it sur-
reptitiously flees me toward an irremediable. My body is
there not only as the point of view which I am but again as
a point of view on which are actually brought to bear points
of view which I could never take; my body escapes me on
all sides. This means first that this ensemble of senses,
which themselves can not be apprehended, is given as appre-
hended elsewhere and by others. This apprehension which
IS thus emptily manifested does not have the character of an
ontological necessity; its existence can not be derived even
from my facticity, but it is an evident and absolute fact. It
has the character of a factual necessity. Since my facticity is
pure contingency and is revealed to me non-thetically as a
factual necessity, the being-for-others of this facticity comes
462 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
to increase the contingency of this facticity, which is lost
and flees from me in an infinity of contingency which es-
capes me. Thus at the very moment when I live my senses
as this inner point of view on which I can take no point of
view, their being-for-others haunts me: they are. For the
Other, my senses are as this table or as this tree is for me.
They are in the midst of a world; they are in and through
the absolute flow of my world toward the Other. Thus the
relativity of my senses, which I can not think abstractly
without destroying my world, is at the same time perpetual-
ly made present to me through the Other’s existence; but it
is a pure and inapprehensible appresentation.
In the same way my body is for me the instrument which
I am and which can not be utilized by any instrument. But
to the extent that the Other in the original encounter tran-
scends my being-there toward his possibilities, this instrument
which I am is made-present to me as an instrument sub-
merged in an infinite instrumental series, although I can in
no way view this series by “surveying” it. My- body as alien-
ated escapes me toward a being-a-tool-among-tools, toward
a being-a-sense-organ-apprehended-by-sense-organs, and this
is accompanied by an alienating destruction and a concrete
collapse of my world which flows toward the Other and
which the Other will reapprehend in his world. When, for
example, a doctor listens to my breathing, I perceive his ear.
To the extent that the objects of the world indicate me as an
absolute center of reference, this perceived ear indicates cer-
tain structures as forms which I exist on my body-as-a-ground.
These structures — ^in the same upsurge with my being — ^be-
long with the purely lived; they are that which I exist and
wMch I nihilate. Thus we have here in the first place the
original connection between designation and the lived. The
things perceived designate that which I subjectively exist.
But I apprehend-^n the collapse of the sense object “ear”
— the doctor as listening to the sounds in my body, feeling
my body with his body, and immediately the lived-desig-
nated becomes designated as a thing outside my subjectivity,
in the midst of a world which is not mine. My body is des-
ignated as alienated.
The experience of my alienation is made in and through
affective structures such as, for example, shyness.^ To “feel
oneself blushing,” to “feel oneself sweating,” etc., are in-
®Tr. In French, tlmidlti, which carries also the idea of timidity.
466
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
that pain “in the stomach” is the stomach itself as pain-
fully lived. As such before the intervention of the alienating,
cognitive stratum, the pain is neither a local sign nor
identification. Gastralgia is the stomach present to con-
sciousness as the pure quality of pain. As we have seen, the
Illness as such is distinguished from all other pain and from
any other illness — and by itself without an intellectual opera-
tion of identification or of discrimination. At this level, how-
ever, “the stomach” is an inexpressible; it can be neither
named nor thought. It is only this suffered figure which is
raised on the ground of the body-existed. Objectivating em-
pirical knowledge, which presently surpasses the Illness
suffered toward the stomach named, is the knowing of a cer-
tain objective nature possessed by the stomach. I know that it
has the shape of a bagpipe, that it is a sack, that it produces
juices and enzymes, that it is enclosed by a muscular tunica
with smooth fibres, etc. I can also know — because a' physi-
cian has told me — that the stomach has an ulcer, and again I
can more or less clearly picture the ulcer to myself. I can ■
imagine it as a redness, a slight internal putrescence; I can
conceive of it by means of analogy with abscesses, fever blis-
ters, pus, canker sores, etc. All this on principle stems .from
bits of knowledge which I have acquired from Others or from
such knowledge as Others have of me. In any case all this
can constitute my Illness, not as I enjoy possession of it, but
as it escapes me. The stomach and the ulcer become direc-
tions of flight, perspectives of alienation from the object which
I possess.
At this point a new layer of existence appears: we have
surpassed the lived pain toward the suffered iUness; now we
surpass the illness toward the Disease.^ The Disease as psychic
is of course very different from the disease known and de-
scribed by the physician; it is a state. There is no question
here of bacteria or of lesions in tissue, but of a synthetic form
of destruction. This form on principle escapes me; at times it
is revealed to the Other by the “twinges” of pain, by the
“crises” of my Illness, but the rest of the time it remains out - -
of reach without, disappearing. It is then objectively discem-
® Tr. Sartre in. this and in the earlier related passage is contrasting three
things— pain, illness, disease. "Pain” refers to the specific aches and twinges,
“illn^s” to -the familiar recurrent pattern of these, “disease” to a
totality which includes along with pain and illness the cause of them both'
and which can be diagnosed and named by the physician. The French words
are douleur, mat, and maladie. ^ . *
THE BODY
467
ible for Others. Others have informed me of it, Others can
diagnose it; it is present for Others even though I am not
conscious of it. Its true nature is therefore a pure and simple
being-for-others. When I am not suffering, I speak of it, I
conduct myself with respect to it as with respect to an object
which on principle is out of reach, for which others are the
depositories. If I have hepatitis, I avoid drinking wine so as
not to arouse pains in my liver. But my precise goal — ^not to
arouse pains in my liver — is in no way distinct from that
other goal — ^to obey the prohibitions of the physician who re-
vealed the pain to me. Thus anotiaer is responsible for my
disease.
Yet. this object which comes to me through others pre-
serves characteristics of a degraded spontaneity from the fact
that I apprehend it through my Illness. It is not our intention
to describe this new object nor to dwell on its, characteristics
— ^its magical spontaneity, its destructive finality, its evil poten-
tiality — on its familiarity with me, and on. its concrete rela-
tions with my being (for it is before all else; my disease) . We
wish only to point out that in the disease itself the body is a
given: by the very fact that it was the support of the Illness, it
is at present the substance of the disease, that which is de-
stroyed by the disease, that across which this destructive form
is extended. Thus the injured stomach is present through the
gastralgia as the very matter out of which this gastralgia is
made. The stomach is there; it is present to intuition and I
apprehend it with its characteristics through the suffered pain.
I grasp it as that which is gnawed at, as a “sack in the
shape of a bagpipe,” etc. I do not see it, to be sure, but I
know that it is my pain. Hence the phenomena which are in-
correctly called “endoscopy.” In reality the pain itself tells
me nothing about my stomach — contrary to what SoUier
claims. But in and by means of the pain, my practical knowl-
edge of it constitutes a stomach-for-others, which appears to
me as a concrete and definite absence with exactly those ob-
jective characteristics which I have been able to know in it.
But on principle the object thus defined stands as the pole of
alienation of my pam; it is, on principle, that which I am
wthout having to be it and without being able to transcend
it toward anything else. Thus in the same way that a being-
for-others haimts myfacticity (which is non-thetically lived),
so a being-an-object-for-others haunts — as a dimension of es-
cape from my psychic body — ^the facticity constituted as a
468
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
quasi-object for an accessory reflection. In the same way pure
nausea can be surpassed toward a dimension of alienation; it
will then present to me my body-for-others in its “shape,” its
“bearing,” its “physiognomy”; it will be given then as disgust
with my face, disgust with my too-white flesh, with my too-
grim expression, etc. But we must reverse the terms. I am
not disgusted by all this. Nausea is all this as non-thetically
existed. My knowledge extends my nausea toward that
which it is for others. For it is the Other who grasps my
nausea, precisely as flesh and with the nauseous character of
all flesh.
We have not with these observations exhausted 'the de-
scription of the appearances of my body. It remains to de-
scribe what we shall call an aberrant type of appearance. In
actuality I can see my hands, touch my back, smell the odor
of my sweat. In this case my hand, for example, appears to
me as one object among other objects. It is no longer indi-
cated by the environment as a center of reference. It is or-
ganized with the environment, and like it indicates my body
as a center of reference. It forms a part of the world. In the
same way my hand is no longer the instrument which I can
not handle along with other instniments; on the contrary, it
forms a part of the utensils which I discover in the midst
of the world; I can utilize it by means of my other hand —
for example, when I hold an almond or walnut in my left
fet and then pound it with my right hand. My hand is then
integrated with the infinite system of utensils-utilized. There
is nothing in this new type of appearance which should
disturb us or make us retract the preceding statements.
Nevertheless this type of appearance must be mentioned. It
can be easily explained on condition that we put it in its
proper place in the order of the appearances of the body; that
is, on condition that we examine it last and as a “curiosity”
of our constitution. This appearance of my hand means simply
that in certain well-defined cases we can adopt with regard
to our own body the Other’s point of view or, if you like, that
our own body can appear to us as the body of the Other.
Scholars who have made this appearance serve as a basis for a
general theory of the body have radically reversed the terms
of the problem and have shown themselves up as understand-
ing nothing about the question. We must realize that this
possibility of seeing our body is a pure factual given, absolute-
y contingent. It can be deduced neither from the necessity on
THE BODY
469
the part of the for-itself “to have” a body nor from the factual
structures of the body-for-others. One could easily conceive of
bodies which could not take any view on themselves; it even
appears that this is the case for certain insects which, although
provided with a differentiated nervous system and with sense
organs, can not employ this system and these organs to know
each other. We are dealing therefore with a particularity of
structure which we must mention without attempting to
deduce it To have hands, to have hands which can touch
each other — these are two facts which are on the same plane
of contingency and which as such fall in the province of
either pure anatomical description or metaphysics. We can
not take them for the foundation of a study of corporeality.
We must note in addition that this appearance of the
body does not give us the body as it acts and perceives but
only as it is acted on and perceived. In short, as we remarked
at the beginning of this chapter, it would be possible to con-
ceive of a system of visual organs such that it would allow
one eye to see the other. But the seen eye would be seen as a
thing, not as a being of reference. Similarly the hand which I
grasp with my other hand is not apprehended as a hand which
is grasping but as an apprehensible object. Thus the nature
of our body for us entirely escapes us to the extent that we
can take upon it the Other’s point of view. Moreover it must
be noted that even if the arrangement of sense organs allows
us to s6e the body as it appears to the Other, this appearance
of the body as an instrumental-thing is very late in the
child; it is in any case later than the consciousness (of)
the body proper and of the world as a complex of instrumen-
tality; it is later than the perception of the body of the Other.
The child has known for a long tim e how to grasp, to draw
toward himself, to push away, and to hold on to something
before he first leams to pick up his hand and to look at it.
Frequent observation has shown that the child of two months-
does not see his hand as his hand. He looks at it, and if it is
outside^ his visual field, he turns his head and seeks his hand
With his eyes as if, it did not depend on him to bring the
hand back within his sight It is by a series of psychological
operations and of syntheses of identification and recognition
mat the child will succeed in establishing tables of reference
between the body-existed and the body-seen. Again it is neces-
Aat the child begin the learning process with the
Dther’s body. Thus the perception of my body is placed
470
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
chronologically after the perception of the body of the Other.
Considered at its proper place and time and in its original
contingency, this appearance of the body does not seem to be
capable of giving rise to new problems. The body is the in-
strument which I am. It is my facticity of being “in-the-
midst-of-the-world” in so far as I surpass this facticity toward
my being-in-the-world. It is, of course, radically impossible
for me to take a global point of view on this facticity, for
then I should cease to be it. But why is it so astonishing that
certain structures of my body, without ceasing to be a center
of reference for the objects of the world, are ordered from a
radically different point of view as compared with other ob-
jects in such a way that along with the objects they point to
one of my sense organs as a partial center of reference raising
itself as a figure on the body-as-ground? That „my eye should
see itself is by nature impossible. But why is it astonishing
that my hand touches my eyes? If this seems surprising to us,
it is because we have apprehended the necessity for the for-
itself to arise as a concrete point of view on the world as if it
were an ideal obligation strictly reducible to knowable rela-
tions between objects and to simple rules. for the development
of my achieved knowledge. But instead we ought to see here
the necessity of a concrete and contingent existence in the
midst of the world.
CHAPTER THREE
Concrete Relations with Others
Up to this point we have described only our fundamental
relation with the Other. This relation has enabled us to make
explicit our body’s three dimensions of being. And since the
original bond with the Other first arises in connection with
the relation betweeen my body and the Other’s body, it
seemed clear to us that the knowledge of the nature of the
body was indispensable to any study of the particular rela-
tions of my being with that of the Other. These particular
relations, in fact, on both sides presuppose facticity; that is,
our existence as body in the midst of the world. Not that
the body is the instrument and the cause of my relations
with others. But the body constitutes their, meaning and
marks their limits. It is as body-in-situation that I apprehend
the Other’s transcendence-transcended, and it is as body-in-
situation that I experience myself in my alienation for the
Other’s benefit. Now we can examine these concrete rela-
tions since we are cognizant of what the body is. They are
not simple specifications of the fundamental relation. Al-
though each one of them includes within it the original re-
lation with the Other as its essential structure and its foun-
dation, &ey are entirely new modes of being on the part of
the for-itself. In fact they represent the various attitudes of
the for-itself in a world where there are Others. Therefore
each relation in its own way presents the bilateral relation:
for-itself-for-others, in-itself. If then we succeed in making
471
472 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
explicit the structures of our most primitive relations with
the Other-in-the-world, we shall have completed our task.
At the beginning of this work, we asked, “What are the re-
lations of the for-itself with the in-itself?”^ We have learned
now that our task is more complex. There is a relation of the
for-itself with the in-itself in the presence of the Other.
When we have described this concrete fact, we shall be in a
position to form conclusions concerning the fundamental re-
lations of the three modes of being, and we shall perhaps
be able to attempt a metaphysical theory of being in general.
The for-itself as the nMation of the in-itself tempo-
ralizes- itself as a flight toward. Actually it surpasses its fac-
ticity (i.e., to be either given or past or body) toward the
in-itself wiiich it would be if it were able to be its own foun-
dation. This may be translated into terms already psychologi-
cal — and hence inaccurate although perhaps clearer — by say-
ing that the for-itself attempts to escape its factual existence
(i.e., its being there, as an in-itself for which it is in no
way the foundation) and that this flight takes place toward
an impossible future always pursued where the for-itself
would be an in-itself-for-itself — i.e., an in-itself which would
be to itself its own foundation. Thus the for-itself is both
a flight and a pursuit; it flees the in-itself and at the same
time pursues it. The for-itself is a pursued-pursuing. But
in order to lessen the danger of a psychological interpre-
tation of the preceding remarks, let us note that the for-
itself is not first in order to attempt later to attain being; Jn
short we must not conceive of it as an existent which would
be provided with tendencies as this glass is provided with
certain particular qualities. This pursuing flight is not a given
which is added on to the being of the for-itself. The for-it-
self is this veity flight. The flight is not to be distinguished
from the ori^nal nitulation. To say that the for-itself is a
pursued-pursuing, or that it is in the mode of having to be
its being, or that it is not what it is and is what it is not —
each of these statements is saying the same thing. The for-
iteelf is not the in-itself and can not be it. But it is a rela-
tion to the in-itself. It is even the sole relation possible to
the in-itself. Cut off on every side by the in-itself, the for-
itself can not escape it because the for-itself Ts nothing and
it is separated froih the in-itself by nothing. The for-itself
is the foundation of aU negativity and of aU relation. Ihe
for-itself is relation.
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS 473
Such being the case, the upsurge of the Other touches the
for-itself in its very heart. By the Other and for the Other
the pursuing flight is fixed in in-itself. Already the in-itself
.was progressively recapturing it; already it was at once a
radical negation of fact, an absolute positing of value and
yet wholly paralyzed \yith f acticity. But at least it was escap-
ing by temporalization; at least its character as a totality de-
totalized conferred on it a perpetual “elsewhere.” Now it is
this very totality which the Other makes appear before him
and which he transcends toward his own “elsewhere.” It is
this totality which is totalized. For the Other I am irremedi-
ably what I am, and my very freedom is a given characteris-
tic of my being. Thus the in-itself recaptures me at the thresh-
old of the future and fixes me wholly in my very flight,
which becomes a flight foreseen and contemplated, a given
flight. But this fixed flight is never the flight which I am for
myself; it is fixed outside. The objectivity of my flight I
experience as an alienation which I can neither transcend nor
know. Yet by the sole fact that I experience it and that it
confers on my flight that in-itself which it flees, I must turn
back toward it and assume attitudes with respect to it.
Such is the origin of my concrete relations with the Other;
they are wholly governed by my attitudes with respect to the
object which I am for the Other. And as the Other’s ex-
istence reveals to me the being which I am without my being
able either to appropriate that being or even to conceive it,
this existence will motivate two opposed attitudes: First —
The Other looks at me and as such he holds the secret of my
being, he knows what I am. Thus the profound meaning
of my being is outside of me, imprisoned in an absence. The
Other has the advantage over me. Therefore in so far as I
am fleeing the in-itself which I am without founding it, I
can attempt to deny that being which is conferred on me
from outside; that is, I can turn back upon the Other so as
to make an object out of him in turn since the Other’s ob-
ject-ness destroys my object-ness for him. But on the other
hand, in so far as the Qther as freedom is the foundation of
my being-in-itself, I can seek to recover that freedom and to
possess it without removing from it its character as freedom.
In fact if I could identify myself with that freedom which
is the foundation of my being-in-itself, I should be to my-
self my own foundation. To transcend the Other’s transcen-
dence, or, on the contrary, to incorporate that transcendence
474 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
within me without removing from it its character as tran-
scendence — such are the two primitive attitudes which I as-
sume confronting the Other. Here again we must understand
the words exactly. It is not true that I first am and then later
“seek” to make an object of the Other or to assimilate him;
but to the extent that the upsurge of my being is an upsurge
in the presence of the Other, to the extent that I am a pur-
suing flight and a pursued-pursuing, I am — at the very root
of my being — ^the project of assimilating and making an ob-
ject of the Other. I am the proof of the Other. That is the-
original fact. But this proof of the Other is in itself an atti-
tude toward the Other; that is, I can not be in the presence
of the Other without being that “in-the-presence” in the
form of having to be it. Thus again we are describing the
for-itself’s structures of being although the Other’s presence
in the world is an absolute and self-evident fact, but a con-
tingent fact — that is, a fact impossible to deduce from the
ontological structures of the for-itself.
These two attempts v/hich I am are opposed to one an-
other. Each attempt is the death of the other; that is, the
failure of the one motivates the adoption of the other. Thus
there is no dialectic for my relations toward the Other but
rather a circle — although each attempt is enriched by the
failure of the other. Thus we shall study each one in turn.
But it should be noted that at the very core of the one the
other remains always present, precisely because neither of the
two can be held without contradiction. Better yet, each of
them is in the other and endangers the death of the other.
Thus we can never get outside the circle. We must not for-
get these facts as we approach the study of these funda-
mental attitudes toward the Other. Since these attitudes are
produced and destroyed in a circle, it is as arbitrary to begin
with the one as with the other. Nevertheless since it is nec-
essary to choose, we shall consider first the conduct in which
the for-itself tries to assimilate the Other’s freedom.
I FIRST ATTITUDE TOWARD OTHERS:
LOVE, LANGUAGE, MASOCHISM
Everything which may be said of me in my relations with
the Other applies to him as well. While I attempt to free my-
self from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free
475
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
himself, from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, ^e
Other seeks to enslave me. We are by no means dealing
with unilateral relations with an object-in-itself, but with
reciprocal and moving relations. The following descriptions
of concrete behavior must therefore be envisaged within the
perspective of conflict. Conflict is the original meaning of
being-for-others.
If we start with the first revelation of the Other as a look,
we must recognize that we experience our inapprehensible
being-for-others in the form of a possession. I am possessed
by the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its naked-
ness, causes it to be bom, sculptures it, produces it as it is,
sees it as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret — ^the
secret of what I am. He makes me be and thereby he possesses
me, and this possession is nothing other than die conscious-
ness of possessing me. I in the recognition of my object-
state have proof that he has this consciousness. By virtue of -
consciousness the Other is for me simultaneously the one
who has stolen my being from me and the one who causes
“there to be” a being which is my being. Thus I have a
comprehension of this ontological structure: I am responsible
for my being-for-others, but I am not the foundation of it
It appears to me therefore m the form of a contingent given
for which I am nevertheless responsible; the Other founds
my being in so far as this being is in the form of the “there
is.” But he is not responsible for my being although he
founds it in complete freedom — in and by means of his free
transcendence. Thus to the extent that I am revealed to my-
self as responsible for my being, I lay claim to this being
which I am; that is, I wish to recover it, or, more exactly,
I am the project of the recovery of my being. I want to
stretch out my hand and grab hold of this being which is
presented to me as my being but at a distance — ^like the
dmner of Tantalus; I want to found it by my very freedom.
For if in one sense my being-as-object is an unbearable con-
tingency and the pure “possession” of myself by another,
still in another sense this being stands as the indication of
what I should be obliged to recover and found in order to
be the foundation of myself. But this is conceivable only if
. ^similate the Other’s freedom. Thus my project of recover-
is fundamentally a project of absorbing the Other.
^ Nevertheless this project must leave the Other’s nature
intact. Two consequences result: (1) I do not thereby cease
476 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
to assert the Other— that is, to deny concerning myself that
I am the Other. Since the Other is the foundation of my
being, he could not be dissolved in me wi^out my being-
for-others disappearing. Therefore if I project the realiza-
tion of unity for the Other, this means that I project my
assimilation of the Other’s Otherness as my own possibility.
In fact the problem for me is to make myself be by acquir-
ing the possibility of taking the Other’s point of view on
myself. It is not a matter of acquiring a pure, abstract faculty
of knowledge. It is not the pure category of the Other
which I project appropriating to myself. This category is
not conceived nor even conceivable. But on the occasion of
concrete experience with the Other, an experience suffered
and realized, it is this concrete Other as an absolute reality
whom in his otherness I wish to incorporate into myself.
(2) The Other whom I wish to assimilate is by no means
the Other-as-object. Or, if you prefer, my project of incor-
porating the Other in no way corresponds to a recapturing
of my for-itself as myself and to a surpassing of the Other’s
transcendence toward my own possibilities. For me it is not
a question of obliterating my object-state by making an ob-
ject of the Other, which would amount to releasing myself
from my being-for-others. Quite the contrary, I want to as-
similate the Other as the Other-looking-at-me, and this proj-
ect of assimilation includes an augmented recognition of my
being-looked-at. In short, in order to maintain before me
the Other’s freedom which is looking at me, I identify my-
self -totally with my being-looked-at And since my being-as-
object is the only possible relation between me and the
Odier, it is this being-as-object which alone can serve me as
an instrument to effect my assimilation of the other freedom.
Thus as a reaction to the failure of the third ekstasis, the
for-itself wishes to be identified with the Other’s freedom
as founding its own being-in-itself. To be other to oneself
— ^the ideal always aimed at concretely in the form of being
this Other to oneself — ^is the primary value of my relations
with the Other. This means that my being-for-others is
haunted by the indication of an absolute-being which would
be itself as other and other as itself and which, by freely giv-
ing to itself its being-itself as other and its being-other as
itself, would be the very being of the ontological proof —
that is, God. This ideal can not be realized without my sur-
mounting the original contingency of my relations to the
477
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
Other; that is, by overcoming the fact that there is no rela-
tion of internal negativity between the negation by which
the Other is made other than I and the negation by which
I am made other than the Other. We have seen that this
contingency is insurmountable; it is the fact of my relations
with the Other, just as my body is the fact of my being-in-
the-world. Unity with the Other is therefore in fact un-
realizable. It is also unrealizable in theory, for the assimila-
tion of the for-itself and the Other in a single transcendence
would necessarily involve the disappearance of the character-
istic of otherness in the Other. Thus the condition on which
I project the identification of myself with the Other is that
I persist in denying that I am the Other. Finally this project
of unification is the source of conflict since while I experi-
ence myself as an object for the Other, and while I project-
assimilating him in and by means of this experience, the
Other apprehends me as an object in the midst of the world
and does not project identifying me with himself. It would
therefore be necessary — since being-for-others includes a dou-
ble mternal negation — ^to act upon the internal negation by
which the Other transcends my transcendence and makes me
exist for the Other; that is, to act upon the Other’s freedom.
This unrealizable ideal which haunts my project of myself
in the presence of the Other is not to be identified with love
in so far as love is an enterprise; i.e., an organic ensemble
of projects toward my own possibilities. But it is the ideal
of love, its motivation and its end, its unique value. Love
as the primitive relation to the Other is the ensemble of the
projects by which I aim at realizing this value.
These projects put me in direct connection with the Oth-
er’s freedom. It is in this sense that love is a conflict. We
have observed that the Other’s freedom is the foundation of
my being. But precisely because I exist by means of the
Other’s freedom, I have no security; I am in danger in this
freedom. It moulds my being and makes me be, it confers
values upon me and removes them from me; and my being
receives from it a perpetual passive escape from self. Irre’
sponsible and beyond reach, this protean freedom in which
myself can in turn engage me in a thousand
different ways of being. My project of recovering my being
can be realized only if I get hold of this freedom and reduce
It to being a freedom subject to my freedom. At the same
time it is the only way in which I can act on the free nega-
478
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
tion of interiority by which the Other constitutes me as an
Other; that is the only way in which I can prepare the way
for a future identification of the Other with me. This will
be clearer perhaps if we study the problem from a purely
psychological aspect. Why does the lover want to be loved?
If Love were in fact a pure desire for physical possession, it
could in many cases be easily satisfied. Proust’s hero, for
example, who installs his mistress in his home, who can see
her and possess her at any hour of the day, who has been
able to make her completely dependent on him economically,
ought to be free from worry. Yet we know that he is, on the
contrary, continually gnawed by anxiety. Through her con-
sciousness Albertine escapes Marcel even when he is at her
side, and that is why he knows relief only when he gazes on
her while she sleeps. It is certain then that the lover wishes
to capture a “consciousness.” But why does he wish it? And
how?
The notion of “ownership,” by which love is so often ex-
plained, is not actually primary. Why should I want to ap-
propriate the Other if it were not precisely that tbe Other
makes me be? But this implies precisely a certain mode of
appropriation; it is the Other’s freedom as such that we want
to get hold of. Not because of a desire for power. The tyrant
scorns love, he is content with fear. If he seeks to win the
love of his subjects, it is for political reasons; and if he finds
a more economical way to enslave- them, he adopts it imme-
diately. On the other hand, the man who wants to be loved
does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He is not
bent on becoming the object of passion which flows forth
mechanically. He does not want to possess an automaton,
and if we want to humiliate him, we need only try to per-
suade him that the beloved’s passion is the result of a psy-
chological determinism. The lover will then feel that both
his love and his being are cheapened. If Tristan and Isolde
fall madly in love because of a love potion, they are less in-
teresting. The total enslavement of the beloved lolls the
love of the lover. The end is surpassed; if the beloved is
transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself
alone. Thus the lover does not desire to possess the beloved
as one possesses a thing; he demands a special type of ap-
propriation. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom.
On the other hand, the lover can not be satisfied with
that superior form of freedom which is a free and voluntary
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH .OTHERS
479
engagement. Who would be content with a love given as
pure loyalty to a sworn oath? Who would be satisfied with
the words, “I love you -because I have freely engaged my-
self to love you and because I do not wish to go back on my
word.” Thus the lover demands a pledge, yet is irritated by
a pledge. He wants to be loved by a freedom but demands
that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free. He
wishes that the Other’s freedom should determine itself to
become love — and this not only at the beginning of the af-
fair but at each instant — and at the same time he wants this
freedom to be captured by itself, to turn back upon itself,
as in madness, as in a dream, so as to will its own captivity.
This captivity must be a resignation that is both free and yet
chained in our hands. In love it is not a determinism of the
passions which we desire in the Other nor a freedom beyond
reach; it is a freedom which plays the role of a determinism
of the passions and which is caught in its own role. For him-
self the lover does not demand that he be the cause of this
radical modification of freedom but that he he the unique
and privileged occasion of it In fact he could not want to
be the cause of it without immediately submerging the be-
loved in the midst of the world as a tool which can be tran-
scended. That is not the essence of love. On the contrary, in
Love the Lover wants to be “the whole World” for the be-
loved. This means that he puts himself on the side of the
world; he is the one who assumes and symbolizes the world;
he is a this which includes all other thises. He is and con-
sents to be an object. But on the other hand, he wants to
be the object in which the Other’s freedom consents to lose
itself, the object in which the Other consents to find his be-
ing and his raison d’etre as his second facticity — the object-
limit of transcendence, that toward which the Other’s tran-
scendence transcends all other objects but which it can in no
way transcend. And everywhere he desires the circle of the
Other’s freedom; that is, at each instant as the Other’s free-
dom accepts this limit to his transcendence, this acceptance is
already present as the motivation of the acceptance consid-
ered. It is in the capacity of an end already chosen that the
lover wishes to be chosen as an end. This dlows us to grasp
what basically the lover demands of the beloved; he does
not want to act on the Other’s freedom but to exist a priori
as the objective limit of this freedom; that is, to be given at
480
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
one stroke along with it and in its very upsurge as the limit
which the freedom must accept in order to be free. By this
very fact, what he demands is a limiting, a gluing down of
the Other’s freedom by itself; this limit of structure is in
fact a given, and the very appearance of the given as the
limit of freedom means that the freedom makes itself exist
within the given by being its own prohibition against sur-
passing it. This prohibition is envisaged by the lover simuU
taneously as something lived — that is, something suffered
(in a word, as a facticity) and as something freely consented
to. It must be freely consented to since it must be effected
only with the upsurge of a freedom which chooses itself as
freedom. But it must be only what is lived since it must
be an impossibility always present, a facticity which surges
back to the heart of the Other’s freedom. This is expressed
psychologically by the demand that the free decision to love
me, which the beloved formerly has taken, must slip in as a
magically determining motivation within his present free en-
gagement.
Now we can grasp the meaning of this demand: the
facticity which is to be a factual limit for the Other in my de-
mand to be loved and which is to result in being his own
facticity — this is my facticity. It is in so far as I am the object
which the Other makes come into being Aat I must be
the inherent limit to his very transcendence. Thus the Other
by his upsmrge into being makes me be as unsurpassable and
absolute, not as a nihilating For-itself but as a being-for-
others-in-the-midst-of-the-world. Thus to want to be loved is
to invest the Other with one’s own facticity; it is to wish to
compel him to re-create you perpetually as the condition of a
freedom which submits itself and which is engaged; it is to
wish both that freedom foimd fact and that fact have pre-
eminence over freedom. If this end could be attained, it
would result in the first place in my being secure within the
Other’s consciousness. First because the motive of my un-
easiness and ray shame is the fact that I apprehend and ex-
perience myself in my being-for-others as that which can
always be surpassed toward something else, that which is the
pure object of a value judgment, a pure means, a pure tool.
My uneasiness stems from the fact that I assume necessarily
and freely that being which another makes me be in an ab-
solute freedom. “God knows what I am for him! God knows
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
481
wbat he thinks of me!” This means “God knows what he
makes me be.” I am haunted by this being which I fear to
encoimtef someday at the turn of a path, this being which
is so strange to me and which is yet my being and which I
know that I shall never encounter in spite of all my efforts to
do so. But if the Other loves me then I become the unsur-
passable, which means that I must be the absolute end. In this
sense I am saved from instrumentality. My existence in the
midst of the world becomes the exact correlate of my tran-
scendence-for-myself since my independence is absolutely
safeguarded. The object which the Other must make me be
is an object-transcendence, an absolute center of reference
arotmd which all the instrumental-things of the world are
ordered as pure means. At the same time, as the absolute limit
of freedom — i.e., of the absolute source of all values — am
protected against any eventual devalorization. I am the ab-
solute value. To the extent that I assume my being-for-others,
I assume myself as value. Thus to want to be loved is to want
to be placed beyond the whole system of values posited by the
Other and to be the condition of all valorization and the ob-
jective foundation of all values. This demand is the usual
theme of lovers’ conversations, whether as in La Porte
Etroite, the woman who wants to be loved identifies herself
with an ascetic morality of self-surpassing and wishes to
embody the ideal limit of this surpassing — or as more usually
happens, the woman in love demands that the beloved in his
acts should sacrifice traditional morality for her and is
anxious to know whether the beloved would betray his friends
for her, “would steal for her,” “would kill for her,” etc.
From this point of view, my being must escape the look
of the beloved, or rather it must be the object of a look with
another structure. I must no longer be seen on the ground of
the world as a "this” among other “thises,” but the world
must be revealed in terms of me. In fact to the extent that
the upsurge of freedom makes a world exist, I must be, as the
limiting-condition of this upsurge, the very condition of the
upsurge of a world. I must be the one whose function is to
makes trees and water exist, to make cities and fields and
other men exist, in order to give them later to the Other who
arranges them into a world, just as the mother in matrilineal
communities receives titles and the family name not to keep
them herself but to transfer them immediately to her chil-
482
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
dren. In one sense if I am to be loved, I am the object by
whose agency the world will exist for the Other; in an-
other sense I am the world. Instead of being a “this” detach-
ing itself on the ground of the world, I am the ground-as*ob-
ject on which the world detaches itself. Thus I am reassured;
the Other’s look no longer paralyzes me with finitude. It no
longer fixes my being in what I am. I, can no longer be
looked at as ugly, as small, as cowardly, since these character-
istics necessarily represent a factual limitation of my being
and an apprehension of my finitude as finitude. To be sure,
my possibles remain transcended possibilities, dead-possibil-
ities; but I possess all possibles. I am all the dead-possibilities
in the world; hence I cease to be the being who is understood
from the standpoint of other beings or of its acts. In the
loving intuition which I demand, I am to be given as an ab-
solute totality in terms of which, all its peculiar acts and all
beings are to be understood. One could say, slightly modify-
ing a famous pronouncement of the Stoics, that “the beloved
can fail in three ways.”^ The ideal of the sage and the ideal
of the man who wants to be loved actually coincide in this
that both want to be an object-as-totality accessible to a global
intuition which will apprehend the beloved’s or the sage’s
actions in the world as partial structures which are interpreted
in terms of the totality. Just as wisdom is proposed as a state
to be attained by an absolute metamorphosis, so the Other’s
freedom must be absolutely metamorphosed in order to allow
me to attain the state of being loved.
Up to this point our description would fall into line
with Hegel’s famous description of the Master and Slave re-
lation. What the Hegelian Master is for the Slave, the lover
wants to be for the beloved. But the analogy stops here, for
with Hegel the Master demands the Slave’s freedom only later-
ally and, so to speak, implicitly, while the lover wants the
beloved’s freedom first and foremost. In this sense if I am
to be loved by the Other, this means that I am to be freely
chosen as beloved. As we know, in the current terminology
of love, the beloved is often called the chosen one. But this
choice must not be relative and contingent. The lover is
irritated and feels himself cheapened when he thinks that the
beloved has chosen him from among others. “Then if I had
not come into a certain city, if I had not visited the home of
iTr. Literally, “can tumble three times.”
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
483
so and so, you would never have known me, you wouldn’t
have loved me?” This thought grieves the lover; his love be-
comes one love among others and is limited by the beloved’s
facticity and by his own f acticity as well as by Ihe contingency
of encounters. It becomes love in the world, an object which
presupposes the world and which in turn can exist for others.
What he is demanding he expresses by the awkward and
vitiated phrases of “fatalism.” He says, “We were made for
each other,” or again he uses the expression “soul mate.” But
we must translate all this. The lover knows very well that
“being made for each other” refers to an original choice.
This choice can be God’s, since he is the being who is abso-
lute choice, but God here represents only the farthest possible
limit of the demand for an absolute. Actually what the lover
demands is that the beloved should make of him an absolute
choice. This means that the beloved’s being-in-the-world
must be a being-as-loving. The upsurge of the beloved must
be the beloved’s free choice of the lover. And since the
Other is the foundation of my being-as-object, I demand of
him that the free upsurge of Ms being should have Ms choice
of me as his unique and absolute end; that is, that he should
choose to be for the sake of founding my object-state and my
facticity.
Thus my facticity is saved. It is no longer this unthink-
able and insurmountable given wMch I am fleeing; it is
that for wMch the Other freely makes himself exist; it is as
an end wMch he has given to himself. I have infected him
with my facticity, but as it is in the form of freedom that
he has been infected with it, he refers it back to me as a
facticity taken up and consented to. He is the foundation of
it in order that it may be his end. By means of tMs love I
then have a different apprehension of my alienation and of
my own facticity. My facticity — as for-others — is no longer
a fact but a right. My existence is because it is given a name.
I am because I give myself away. These beloved veins on my
hands exist — beneficently. How good I am to have eyes, hair,
eyebrows and to lavish them away tirelessly in an overflow of
generosity to this tireless desire wMch the Other freely makes
himself be. Whereas before being loved we were uneasy
about that unjustified, unjustifiable protuberance wMch was
pur existence, whereas we felt ourselves “de trop,” we now
feel that our existence is taken up and willed even in its
484 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
tiniest details by an absolute freedom which at the same time
our existence conditions and which we ourselves will with
our freedom. This is the basis for the joy of love when there
is joy; we feel that our existence is justified.
By the same token if the beloved can love us, he is wholly
ready to be assimilated by our freedom; for this being-loved
which we desire is already the ontological proof applied to our
being-for-others. Our objective essence implies the existence
of the Other, and conversely it is the Other’s freedom which
founds our essence. If we could manage to interiorize the
whole system, we should be our own foundation.
Such then is the real goal of the lover in so far as his love
is an enterprise — Le., a project of himself. This project is
going to provoke a conflict The beloved in fact apprehends
the lover as one Other-as-object among others; that is, he per-
ceives the lover on the ground of the world, transcends him,
and utilizes him. The beloved is a look. He can not therefore
employ his transcendence to fix an ultimate limit to his sur-
passings, nor can he employ his freedom to captivate itself.*
The beloved can not will to love. Therefore the lover must
seduce the beloved, and his love can in no way be dis-
tinguished from the enterprise of seduction. In seduction I
do not try to reveal my subjectivity to the Other. Moreover
I could do so only by looking at the other; but by this look I
should cause the Other’s subjectivity to disappear, and it is
exactly this which I want to assimilate. To seduce is to risk
assuming my object-state completely for the Other; it is to
put myself beneath his look and to make him look at me; it
is to risk the danger of being-seen in order to effect .a new
departure and to appropriate the Other in and by means of my
object-ness. I refuse to leave the level on which I make proof
of my object-ness; it is on this level that I wish to engage in
battle by making myself a fascinating object. In Part Two we
defined fascination as a state. It is, we said, the non-thetic
consciousness of being nothing in the presence of being.
Seduction aims at producing in the Other the consciousness
of his state of nothingness as he confronts the seductive ob-
ject. By seduction I aim at constituting myself as a fullness
of being and at making myself recognized as such. To accom-
plish this I constitute myself as a meaningful object. My acts
must point in two directions: On the one hand, toward that
which is wrongly called subjectivity and which is rather a
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
485
depth of objective and hidden being; the act is not performed
for itself only, but it points to an infinite, undifferentiated
series of other real and possible acts which I give as con-
stituting my objective, unperceived being. Thus I try to guide
the transcendence which transcends me and to refer it to the
infinity of my dead-possibilities precisely in order to be the
unsurpassable and to the exact extent to which the only im-
surpassable is the infin ite. On the other hand, each of my
acts tries to point to the great density of possible-world and
must present me as bound to the vastest regions of the world.
At the same time I present the world to the beloved, and I
try to constitute myself as the necessary intermediary between
her and the world; I manifest by my acts infinitely varied
examples of my power over the world (money, position, “con-
nections,” etc.). In the first case I try to constitute myself as
an infinity of depth, in the second case to identify myself
with the world. Through these different procedures I propose
myself as unsurpassable. This proposal could not be suffi-
cient in itself; it is only a besieging of the Other. It can not
take on value as fact without the consent of the Other’s free-
dom, which I must capture by making it recognize itself as
nothingness in the face of my plenitude of absolute being.
Someone may observe that these various attempts at ex-
pression presuppose language. We shall not disagree with
this. But we shall say rather that they are language or, if you
prefer, a fundamental mode of language. For while psycholog-
ical and historical problems exist with regard to the existence,
the learning and the use of a particular language, there is no
special problem concerning what is called the discovery or in-
vention of language. Language is not a phenomenon added on
to being-for-others. It is originally being-for-others; that is, it
is the fact that a subjectivity experiences itself as an object
for the Other. In a universe of pure objects language could
under no circumstances have been “invented” since it pre-
supposes an original relation to another subject. In the inter-
subjectivity of the for-others, it is not necessary to invent
language because it is already given in the recognition of the
Other. I am language. By the sole fact that whatever I may do,
my acts freely conceived and executed, my projects launched
toward my possibilities have outside of them a meaning
which escapes me and which I experience. It is in this sense
and in this sense only — that Heidegger is right m declaring
486
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
that I am what I say.^ Language is not an instinct of the con-
stituted human creature, nor is it an invention of our subjec-
tivity. But neither does it need to be referred to the pure “be-
ing-outside-of-self” of the Dasein. It forms part of the human
condition; it is originally the proof which a f or-itself can make
of its being-for-others, and finally it is the surpassing of this
proof and the utilization of it toward possibilities which are
my possibilities; that is, toward my possibilities of being this
or that for the Other. Language is therefore not distinct from
the recognition of the Other’s existence. The Other’s upsurge
confronting me as a look makes language arise as the condi-
tion of my being. This primitive language is not necessarily
seduction; we shall see other forms of it. Moreover we
have noted that there is another primitive attitude confronting
the Other and that the two succeed each other in a circle, each
implying the other. But conversely seduction does not pre-
suppose any earlier form of language; it is the complete real-
ization of language. This means that language can be revealed
entirely and at one stroke by seduction as a primitive mode of
being of expression. Of course by language we mean all the
phenomena of expression and not the articulated word, which
is a derived and secondary mode whose appearance can be
made the object of an historical study. Especially in seduction
language does not aim at giving to be known but at causing
to experience.
But in this first attempt to find a fascinating language I
proceed blindly since I am guided only by the abstract and
empty form of my object-state for the Other. I can not even
conceive what effect my gestures and attitudes will have since
they will always be taken up and founded by a freedom which
wifi surpass them and since they can have a meaning only if
this freedom confers one on them. Thus the “meaning” of my
expressions always escapes me. I never know exactly if I signi-
fy what I wish to signify nor even if I am signifying anything.
®T1u 3 fonnulation of Heidegger’s position is that of A. de Waehlens.
La ^ phllosophie de Martin Heidegger, Louvain, 1942, p. 99. Cf. also-
Heidegger’s text, which he quotes: “Diese Bezeugung meint nicht hier einen
nachtraglichen und beiher laufenden Ausdruck des Menschseins, sondem sie
macht das Dasein Menschen mit usw. (Holderlin und das Wesen der Dich-
iung, p. 6).
( “This affirmation does not mean here an additional and supplementary
expression of human existence, but it does in the process make plain the
existence of man.” Douglas Scott’s translation. Existence and Being, Chicago:
Henry Regnery. 1949, p. 297.)
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
487
It would be necessary that at the precise instant I should read
in the Other what on principle is inconceivable. For lack of
knowing what I actually express for the Other, I constitute my
language as an incomplete phenomenon- of flight outside my-
self. As soon as I express myself, I can only guess at the
meaning of what I express — i.e., the meaning of what I
am — since in this perspective to express and to be are one.
The Other is always there, present and experienced as the one
who gives to language its meaning. Each ^expression, each
gesture, each word is on my side a concrete proof of the
alienating reality of the Other. It is only the psychopath who
can say, “someone has stolen my thought” — as in cases of
psychoses of influence, for example.^ The very fact of expres-
sion is a stealing of thought since thought needs the coopera-
tion of an alienating freedom in order to be constituted as an
object. That is why this first aspect of language — in so far as
it, is I who employ it for the Other — is sacred. The sacred
object is an object which is in the world and which points
to a transcendence beyond the world. Language reveals to me
the freedom (the transcendence) of the one who listens to
me in silence.
But at the same moment I remain for the Other a meaning-
ful object — that which I have always been. There is no path
which departing from my object-state can lead the Other to
my transcendence. Attitudes, expressions, and words can only
indicate to him other attitudes, other expressions, and other
words. Thus language remains for him a simple property of a
magical object— and this magical object itself. It is an action
at a distance whose effect the Other exactly knows. Thus the
word is sacred when I employ it and magic when the Other
hears it. Thus I do not know my language any more than I
know my body for the Other. I can not hear myself speak nor
see myself smile. The problem of language is exactly parallel
to the problem of bodies, and the description which is valid
in one case is valid in the other.
Fascination, however, even if it were to produce a state of
being-fascinated in the Other could not by itself succeed in
producing love. We can be fascinated by an orator, by an
actor, by a tightrope-walker, but this does not mean that we
® Furthermore the psychosis of influence, like the majority of psychoses,
IS a special experience translated by myths, of a great metaphysical fact —
here the fact of alienation. Even a madman in his own way realizes the
human condiUon.
488 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
love him. To be sure we can not take our eyes off him, but
he is still raised on the ground of the world, and fascination
does not posit the fascinating object as the ultimate term of
the transcendence. Quite the contrary, fascination is transcen-
dence. When then will the beloved become in turn the lover?
The answer is easy: when the beloved projects being
loved. By himself the Other-as-object never has enough
strength to produce love. If love has for its ideal the appropri-
ation of the Other qua Other (Le„ as a subjectivity which is
looking at an object) this ideal can be projected only in terms
of my encounter with the Other-as-subject, not with the
Other-as-object. If the Other tries to seduce me by means of
his object-state, then seduction can bestow upon the Other
only the character of a precious object “to be possessed.”
Seduction will perhaps determine me to risk much to conquer
the Other-as-object, but this desire to appropriate an object
in the midst of the world should not be confused with love.
Love therefore can be bom in the beloved only from the
proof which he makes of his alienation and his flight toward
the Other. Still the beloved, if such is the case, will be trans-
formed into a love only if he projects being loved; that is, if
what he wishes to overcome is not a body but the Other’s
subjectivity as such. In fact the only way that he could con-
ceive to realae this appropriation is to make himself be loved.
Thus it seems that to love is in essence the project of making
oneself be loved. Hence this new contradiction and this
new conflict: each of the lovers is entirely the captive of
the Other inasmuch as each wishes to make himself loved
by the Other to the exclusion of anyone else; but at the
same time each one demands from the other a love which
is not reducible to the “project of being-loved.” What he
demands in fact is that the Other without originally seek-
ing to make himself be loved should have at once a con-
templative and affective intuition of his beloved as the objec-
tive limit of his freedom, as the ineluctable and chosen foun-
dation of his transcendence, as the totality of being and the
supreme value. Love thus exacted from the other could not
ask for anything; it is a pure engagement without reciprocity.
Yet this love can not exist except in the form of a demand on
the part of the lover.
The lover is held captive in a wholly different way. He
is the captive of his very demand since love is the demand to
be loved; he is a freedom which wills itself a body and
489
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
which demands an outside, hence a freedom which imi-
tates the flight toward the Other, a freedom which qua freedom
lays claim to its alienation. The lover’s freedom, in his very
effort to make himself be loved as an object by the Other, is
alienated by slipping into the body-for-others; that is, it is
brought into existence with a dimension of flight toward the
Other. It is the perpetual refusal to posit itself as pure self-
ness, for this affirmation of self as itself would involve the
collapse of the Other as a look and the upsurge of the Other-
as-object — hence a state of affairs in which the very possibility
of being loved disappears since the Other is reduced to the
dimension of objectivity. This refusal therefore constitutes
freedom as dependent on the Other; and the Other as subjec-
tivity becomes indeed an unsurpassable limit of the freedom
of the for-itself, the goal and supreme end of the for-itself
since the Other holds the key to its being. Here in fact we
encounter the true ideal of love’s enterprise: alienated free-
dom. But it is the one who wants to be loved who by the mere
fact of wanting someone to love him alienates his freedom.
My freedom is alienated in the presence of the Other’s
pure subjectivity which founds my objectivity. It can never be
alienated before the Other-as-object In this form in fact the
beloved’s alienation, of which the lover dreams, would be
contradictory since the beloved can found the being of the
lover only by transcending it on principle toward other objects
of the world; therefore this transcendence can constitute the
object which it surpasses both as a transcended object and as
an object limit of all transcendence. Thus each one of the
lovers wants to be the object for which the Other’s freedom is
alienated in an original intuition; but this intuition which
would be love in the true sense is only a contradictory ideal
■ of the for-itself. Each one is alienated only to the exact extent
to which he demands the alienation of the other. Each one
wants the other to love him but does not take into accoimt
the fact that to love is to want to be loved and that thus by
wanting the other to love him, he only wants the other to
want to be loved in turn. Thus love relations are a system of
indefinite reference — analogous to the pure “reflection-reflect-
ed’ of consciousness — under the ideal standard of the value
love”; that is, in a fusion of consciousnesses in which each
would preserve his otherness in order to found the
other. This state of affairs is due to the fact that conscious-
nesses are separated by an insurmountable nothingness, a
490 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
nothingness which is both the internal negation of the one
by the other and a factual nothingness between the two inter-
nal negations. Love is a contradictory effort to surmount the
factual negation while preserving the internal negation. I de-
mand that the Other love me and I do everything possible to
realize my project; but if the Other loves me, he radically
deceives me by his very love. I demanded of him that he
should found my being as a privileged object by maintaining
himself as piure subjectivity confronting me; and as soon as he
loves me he experiences me as subject and is swallowed up m
his objectivity confronting my subjectivity.
The problem of my being-for-others remains therefore
without solution. The lovers remain each one for himself in
a total subjectivity; no thin g comes to relieve them of their
duty to make themselves exist each one for himself; nothing
comes to relieve their contingency nor to save them from
facticity. At least each one has succeeded in escaping danger
from the Other’s freedom — but altogether differently than
he expected. He escapes not because the Other makes him
be as the object-limit of his transcendence but because the
Other experiences him as subjectivity and wishes to experi-
ence him only as such. Again the gain is perpetually compro-
mised. At the start, each of the consciousnesses can at any
moment free itself from its chains and suddenly contemplate
the other as an object. Then the spell is broken; the Other
becomes one mean among means. He is indeed an object for
others as the lover desires but an object-as-tool, a perpetually
transcended object. The illusion, the game of mirrors which
makes the concrete reality of love, suddenly ceases. Later in
the experience of love each consciousness seeks to shelter its
being-for-others in the Other’s freedom. This supposes that
the Other is beyond the world as pure subjectivity, as the ab-
solute by which the world comes into being. But it suflBces
that the lovers should be looked at together by a third person
in order for each one to experience not only his own objec-
tivation but that of the other as well. Immediately the Other
is no longer for me the absolute transcendence which founds
me in my being; he is a transcendence-transcended, not by
me but by another. My original relation to him — i.e., my
relation of being the beloved for my lover, is fixed as a dead-
possibility. It is no longer the experienced relation between
a limiting object of all transcendence and the freedom which
founds it; it is a love-as-object which is wholly alienated to-
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
491
ward the third. Such is the true reason why lovers seek soli-
tude. It is because the appearance of a diird person, who-
ever he may be, is the destruction of their love. But factual
solitude (e.g., we are alone in my room) is by no means a
theoretical solitude. Even if nobody sees us, we exist for all
consciousnesses and we are conscious of existing for all. The
result is that love as a fundamental mode of being-for-others
hol^ in its being-for-others the seed of its own destruction.
We have just defined the triple destructibility of love: in
the first place it is, in essence, a deception and a reference to
infinity since to love is to wish to be loved, hence to wish
that the Other wish that I love him. A pre-ontological com-
prehension of this deception is given in the very impulse of
love — Whence the lover’s perpetual dissatisfaction. It does not
come, as is so often said, from the unworthiness of being
loved 'but from an implicit comprehension of the fact that
the amorous intuition is, as a fundamental-intuition, an ideal
out of reach. The more I am loved, the more I lose my being,
the more I am thrown back on my own responsibilities, on
my own power to be. In the second place the Other’s awak-
ening is always possible; at any moment he can make me
appear as an object — hence the lover’s perpetual insecurity.
In the third place love is an absolute which is perpetually
made relative by others. One would have to be alone in the
world with the beloved in order for love to preserve its char-
acter as an absolute axis of reference — Whence the lover’s per-
petual shame (or pride — ^which here amounts to the same
thing).
Thus it is useless for me to have tried to lose myself in
objectivity; my passion will have availed me nothing. The
Other has referred me to my own unjustifiable subjectivity —
either by himself or through others. This result can provoke
a total despair and a new attempt to realize the identification
of the Other and myself. Its ideal will then be the opposite
of that which we have just described; instead of projecting
the absorbing of the Other while preserving in him his oth-
erness, I shall project causing myself to be absorbed by the
Other and losing myself in his subjectivity in order to get
rid of my own. This enterprise will be expressed concretely
by the masochistic attitude. Since the Other is the founda-
tion of my being-for-others, if I relied on the Other to make
me exist, I should no longer be anything more than a being-
in-itself founded in its being by a freedom. Here it is my
492 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
own subjectivity wMch is considered as an obstacle to the
primordial act by which the Other would found me in my
being. It is my own subjectivity which above aU must be de-
nied by my own freedom. I attempt therefore to engage my-
self wholly in my bemg-as-object I refuse to be anything
more than an object. I rest upon the Other, and as I experi-
ence this being-as-object in shame, I will and I love my
shame as the profound sign of my objectivity. As the Other
apprehends me as object by means of actual desire, I wish
to be desired, I make myself in shame an object of desire.*
This attitude would resemble that of love if instead of
seeking to exist for the Other as the object-limit of his
transcendence, I did not rather insist on making myself be
treated as one object among others, as an instrument to be
used. Now it is my transcendence which is to be denied, not
his. This time I do not have to project capturing his freedom;
on the contrary I hope that this freedom may be and will
itself to be radically free. Thus the more I shall feel myself
surpassed toward other ends, the more I shall enjoy the ab-
dication of my transcendence. Finally I project being noth-
ing more than an object; that is, radically an in-itself. But
inasmuch as a freedom which will have absorbed mine will
be the foundation of this in-itself, my being will become
again the foundation of itself. Masochism, like sadism, is the
assumption of guilt.® I am guilty due to the very fact that I
am an object, I am guilty toward myself since I consent to
my absolute alienation. I am guilty toward the Other, for I
furnish him with the occasion of being guilty — that is, of
radically missing my freedom as such. Masochism is an at-
tempt not to fascinate the Other by means of my objectivity
but to cause myself to be fascinated by my objectivity-for-
others; that is, to cause myself to be constituted as an object
by the Other in such a way that I non-thetically apprehend
my subjectivity as a nothing in the presence of the in-itself
which I represent to the Other’s eyes. Masochism is charac-
terized as a species of vertigo, vertigo not before a precipice
of rock and earth but before the abyss of the Other’s sub-
jectivity.
But masochism is and must be itself a failure. In order
to cause myself to be fascinated by my self-as-object, I should
necessarily have to be able to realize the intuitive apprehen-
* Ci. following section.
® Cf. following section. ■ ' ' '
493 -
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
sion of this object such as it is for the Other, a thing which
is on principle impossible. Thus I am far from being able to
be fascinated by this alienated Me, which remains on prin-
ciple inapprehensible. It is useless for the masochist to get
down on his knees, to show himself in ridiculous positions,
to cause himself to be used as a simple lifeless instrument.
It is for the Other that he will be obscene or simply passive,
for the Other that he will undergo these postures; for him-
self he is forever condemned to give them to himself. It is
in and through his transcendence that he disposes of . him-
self as a being to be transcended. The more he tries to taste
his objectivity, the more he will be submerged by the con-
sciousness of his subjectivity — whence his anguish. Even the
masochist who pays a woman to whip him is treating her as
an instrument and by this very fact posits himself in tran-
scendence in relation to her.
Thus the masochist ultimately treats the Other as an ob-
ject and transcends him toward his own objectivity. Recall,
for example, the tribulations of Sacher Masoch, who in order
to make himself scorned, insulted, reduced to a humiliating
position, was obliged to make use of the great love which
women bore toward him; that is, to act upon them just in so
far as they experienced -themselves as an object for him.
Thus in every way the masochist’s objectivity escapes him,
and it can even happen — in fact usually does happen — ^that
in seeking to apprehend his own objectivity he finds the
Other’s objectivity, which in spite of himself frees his own
subjectivity. Masochism therefore is on principle a failure.
This should not surprise us if we realize that masochism is a
“vice” and that vice is, on principle, the love of failure. But
this is not the place to describe the structures peculiar to
vice. It is sufficient here to point out that masochism is a
perpetual effort to annihilate the subject’s subjectivity by
causing it to be assimilated by the Other; this effort is ac-
companied by the exhausting and delicious consciousness of
failure so that finally it is the failure itself which the subject
ultimately seeks as his principal goal.®
® Consistent with this description, there is at least one form of exhibi-
tionism which ought to be classed among masochistic attitudes. For example,
when Rousseau exhibits to the washerwomen “not the obscene object but
the ridiculous object." Cf. Confessions, Chapter UL
494
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
IL SECOND ATTITUDE TOWARD OTHERS:
INDIFFERENCE, DESIRE, HATE, SADISM
The failure of the first attitude toward the Other can be
the occasion for my assuming the second. But of course nei-
ther of the two is really first; each of them is a fundamental
reaction to being-for-others as an original situation. It can
happen therefore that due to the very impossibility of my
identifying myself with the Other’s consciousness through
the intermediacy of my object-ness for him, I am led to turn
deliberately toward the Other and look at him. In this case
to look at the Other’s look is to posit oneself in one’s own
freedom and to attempt on the ground of this freedom to
confront the Other’s freedom. The meaning of the conflict
thus sought would be to bring out into the open the struggle
of two freedoms confronted as freedoms. But this intention
must be immediately disappointed, for by the sole fact that
I assert myself in my freedom confronting the Other, I make
the Other a transcendence-transcended — that is, an object.
It is the story of that failure which we are about to investi-
gate. We can grasp its general pattern. I direct my look upon
the Other who is looking at me. But a look can not be looked
at. As soon as I look in the direction of the look it disap-
pears, and I no longer see anything but eyes. At this instant
the Other becomes a being which I possess and which recog-
nizes my freedom. It seems that my goal has been achieved
since I possess the being who has the key to my object-state
and since I can cause him to make proof of my freedom in a
thousand different ways. But in reality the whole structure
has collapsed, for the being which remains within my hands
is an Other-as-object. As such he has lost the key to my be-
ing-as-object, and he possesses a pure and simple image of
me which is nothing but one of its objective affects and
which no longer touches me. If he experiences the effects of
my freedom, if I can act upon his being in a thousand dif-
ways and transcend his possibilities with all my pos-
sibilities, this is only in so far as he is an object in the world
and as such is outside the state of recognizing my freedom.
My , disappointment is complete since I seek to appropriate
the Other’s freedom and perceive suddenly that I can act
upon the Other only in so far as this freedom has collapsed
beneath my look. This disappointment will be the result of
495
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
my further attempts to seek again for the Other’s freedom
across the object which he is for me and to find privileged
attitudes or conduct which would appropriate this freedom
across a total appropriation of the Other’s body. These at-
tempts, as one may suspect, are on principle doomed to
failure.
But it can happen also that “to look at the look” is my
original reaction to my being-for-others. This means that in
my upsurge into the world, I can choose myself as looking at
the Other’s look and can build my subjectivity upon the col-
lapse of the subjectivity of the Other. It is this attitude which
we shall call indifference toward others. Then we are dealing
with a kind of blindness with respect to others. But the term
“blindness” must not lead us astray. I do not suffer this blind-
ness as a state. I am my own blindness with regard to others,
and this blindness includes an implicit comprehension of
being-for-others; that is, of the Other’s transcendence as a
look. This comprehension is simply what I myself determine
to hide from myself. I practice then a sort of factual solip-
sism; others are those forms which pass by in the street, those
magic objects which are capable of acting at a distance and
upon which I can act by means of determined conduct. I
scarcely notice them; I act as if I were alone in the world. I
brush against “people” as I brush against a wall; I avoid them
as I avoid obstacles. Their freedom-as-object is for me only
their “coefiicient of adversity.” I do not even imagine that
they can look at me. Of course they have some knowledge of
me, but this knowledge does not touch me. It is a question of
pure modifications of their being which do not pass from
them, to me and which are tainted with what we call a “suf-
fered-subjectivity” or “subjectivity-as-object”; that is, they
express what they are, not what I am, and they are the effect
of my action upon themr Those “people” are functions: the
ticket-collector is only the function of collecting tickets; the
cafe waiter is nothing but the function of serving the patrons.
In this capacity they will be most useful if I know their keys
and those “master-words” which can release their mecha-
nisms. Hence is derived that “realist” psychology which the
seventeenth century in France has given us; hence those trea-
tises of the eighteenth century. How To Succeed (Moyen de
paryenir) by Beroalde de Verville, Dangerous Liaisons
(Liaisons dangereuses) byLaclos, Treatise on Ambition (Trai-
te de V ambition) by Herault de Sechelles, aU of which give
496
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
to us a practical knowledge of the Other and the art of acting
upon him. In this state of blindness I concurrently ignore the
Other’s absolute subjectivity as the foundation of my being-in-
itself and my being-for-others, in particular of my “body for
others.” In a sense I am reassured, I am self-confident; that is,
I am in no way conscious of the fact that the Other’s look can
fix my possibilities and my body. I am in a state the very
opposite of what we call shyness or timidity. I am at ease; I
am not embarrassed by myself, for I am not outside; I do not
feel myself alienated. This state of blindness can be main-
tained for a long time, as long as my fundamental bad faith
desires; it can be extended — ^with relapses — over several years,
over a whole life; there are men who die without — save for
brief and terrifying flashes of illumination — ever having sus-
pected what the Other is.
But even if one is entirely immersed in this state, one does
not thereby cease to experience its inadequacy." And like all
bad faith it is the state itself which furnishes us with the
motives for getting out of it; for blindness as concerns the
Other concurrently causes the disappearance of every lived
apprehension of my objectivity. Nevertheless the Other as
freedom and my objectivity as my alienated-self are there,
unperceived, not thematized, but given in my very compre-
hension of the world and of my being in the world. The con-
ductor, even if he is considered as a pure function, refers me
by his very function to a being-outside — even though this
being-outside is neither apprehended nor apprehensible.
Hence a perpetual feeling of lack and of uneasiness. This is
because my fundamental project toward the Other — whatever
may be the attitude which I assume — is twofold: first there
is the problem of protecting myself against the danger which
is incurred by my being-outside-in-the-Other’s-freedqm, and
second there is the problem of utilizing the Other in order
finally to totalize the detotalized totality which I am, so as to
close the open circle, and finally to Be my own foundation.
But on the one hand the Other’s disappearance as look throws
me back into my unjustifiable - subjectivity and reduces my
being to this perpetual pursued-pursuit toward an inappre-
hensible In-itself-for-itself. Without the Other I apprehend
fully and nakedly this terrible necessity of being free which is
my lot; that is, the fact that I can not put the responsibility
for making-myself-be off onto anyone but myself even though
I have not 'chosen to be and although I have been borri'. On
497
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
the other hand although the blindness toward the Other does
in appearance release me from the fear of being in danger in
the Other’s freedom, it includes despite all an implicit com-
prehension of this freedom. It therefore places me at the ex-
treme degree of objectivity at the very moment when I can
believe myself to be an absolute and unique subjectivity since
I am seen without being able to experience the fact that I am
seen and without being able by means of the same experience
to defend myself against my “being-seen.” I am possessed
without being able to turn toward the one who possesses me.
In making direct proof of the Other as a look, I defend my-
self by putting the Other to the test, and the possibility re-
mains for me to transform the Other into an object. But if
the Other is an object for me while he is looking at me, then
I am in danger without knowing it. Thus my blindness is
anxiety because it is accompanied by the consciousness of a
“wandering and inapprehensible” look, and I am in danger of
its alienating me behind my back. This uneasiness can occa-
sion a new attempt to get possession of the Other’s freedom.
But this will mean that I am going to turn back upon the
Other-as-object which has been merely brushing against me
and attempt now to utilize him as an instrument in order to
touch his freedom. But precisely because I address myself to
the object “Other” I can not ask him to account for his
transcendence, and since I am myself on the level where I
make an object of the Other, I can not even conceive of what
I wish to appropriate: Thus I am in an irritating and contra-
dictory attitude with respect to this object which I am consid-
ering: not only can I not obtain from him what I wish, but
in addition this quest provokes a disappearance of the practi-
cal knowledge pertaining to what I wish. I engage myself in
a desperate pursuit of the Other’s freedom and midway I find
myself engaged in a pursuit which has lost its meaning. All
my efforts to bring back meaning to the pursuit result only
in making me lose it further and provoking my bewilder-
ment and my uneasiness — ^just as when I attempt to recover
memory of a dream and this memory melts between my
fingers leaying me with a vague and irritating impression of a
total knowledge but with no object, or just as when I attempt
to make explicit the content of a false recollection and the
ve^ explanation causes it to melt away in translucency.
^ My original attempt to get hold of the Other’s free sub-
jectivity through his objectivity-for-me is sexual desire. Per-
498
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
haps it will come as a surprise to see a phenomenon which is
usually classified among “psycho-physiological reactions” now
mentioned on the level of primary attitudes which manifest
our original mode of realizing Being-for-Others. For the ma-
jority of psychologists indeed, desire, as a fact of conscious-
ness, is in strict correlation with the nature of our sexual
organs, and it is only in connection with an elaborate
study of these that sexual desire can be understood. But since
the differentiated structure of the body (mammalian, vivipa-
rous, etc.) and consequently the particular sexual structure
(uterus. Fallopian tubes, ovaries, etc.) are in the domain of
absolute contingency and in no way derive from the on-
tology of “consciousness” or of the Dasein, it seems that the
same must be true for sexual desire. Just as the sex organs are
a contingent and particular formation of our body, so the
desire which corresponds to them would be a contingent
modality of our psychic life; that is, it would be described
only on the level of an empirical psychology based on biology.
This is indicated suflBciently by the term sex instinct, which
is reserved for desire and all the psychic structures which
refer to it. The term "instinct” always in fact qualifies con-
tingent formations of psychic life which have the double
character of being co-extensive with all the duration of this
life — or in any case of not deriving from our “history” — and
of nevertheless not being such that they can not be deduced
as belonging to the very essence of the psychic. This is why
existential philosophies have not believed it necessary to
concern themselves with sexuality. Heidegger, in particular,
does not make the slightest allusion to it in his existential
analytic with the result that his Dasein appears to us as
asexual. Of course one may consider that it is contingent for
“human reality” to be specified as “masculine” or “feminine”;
of course one may say that the problem of sexual differentia-
tion has nothing to do with that of Existence {Existenz) since
man and woman equally exist.
These reasons are not wholly convincing. That sexual dif-
ferentiation lies within the domain of facticity we accept
without reservation. But does this mean that the For-itself is
sexual “accidentally,” by the pure contingency of having this
particular body? Can we admit that this tremendous matter of
Ae sexual life comes as a kind of addition to the human con-
dition? Yet it appears at first glance that desire and its oppo-
site, sexual repulsion, are fundamental structures of being-for-
499
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
others. It is evident that if sexuality derives its origin from
sex as a physiological and contingent determination of man, it
can not be indispensable to the being of the For-Others. But
do we not have the right to ask whether the problem is not
perchance of the same order as that which we encountered
apropos of sensations and sense organs? Man, it is said, is a
, sexual being because he possesses a sex. And if the reverse
were true? If sex were only the instrument and, so to speak,
the image of a fundamental sexuality? If man possessed a sex
only because he is originally and fundamentally a sexual being
as a being who exists in the world in relation with other
men? Infantile sexuality precedes the physiological matu-
ration of the sex organs. Men who have become eunuchs do
not thereby cease to feel desire. Nor do many old men. The
fact of being able to make use of a sex organ fit to fertilize
and to procure enjoyment represents only one phase and one
aspect of our sexual life. There is one mode of sexuality “with
the possibility of satisfaction,” and the developed sex repre-
-sents’ and makes concrete this possibility. But there are other
modes of sexuality of the type which can not get satisfaction,
and if we take these modes into account we are forced to
recognize that sexuality appears with birth and disappears only
with death. Moreover neither the tumescence of the penis
nor any other physiological phenomenon can ever explain or
provoke sexual desire — no more than the vaso-constriction or
the dilation of the pupils (or the simple consciousness of these
physiological modifications) will be able to explain or to pro-
voke fear. In one case as in the other although the body plays
an important role, we must — ^in order to understand it — ^refer
to being-m-the-world and to being-for-others. I desire a hu-
man being, not an insect or a mollusk, and I desire him (or
her) as he is and as I am in situation in the world and as he
is an Other for me and as I am an Other for him.
The fundamental problem of sexuality can therefore be
formulated thus: is sexuality a contingent accident bound to
our physiological nature, or is it a necessary structure of
being-for-itself-for-others? From the sole fact that the ques-
hon can be posited in these terms, we see that we must go
back to ontology to decide it. Moreover ontology can decide
this question o^y . by determining and fixing the meaning
of sexual existence for-the-Other. To have sex means — in
accordance with the description of the body which we at-
empted in the preceding chapter — ^to exist sexually for an
500
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Other who exists sexually for me. And it must be well under-
stood that at first this Other is not necessarily for me — nor
I for him — a heterosexual existent but only a being who has
sex. Considered from the point of view of the For-itself, this
apprehension of the Other’s sexuality could not be the pure
disinterested contemplation of his primary or secondary sexual
characteristics. My first apprehension of the Other as having
sex does not come when I conclude from the distribution of
his hair, from the coarseness of his hands, the sound of his
voice, his strength that he is of the masculine sex. We are
dealing there with derived conclusions which refer to an orig-
inal state. The first apprehension of the Other’s sexuality m
so far as it is lived and suffered can be only desire; it is by .
desiring the Other (or by discovering myself as incapable of
desiring him) or by apprehending his desire for me that I
discover his being-sexed. Desire reveals to me simultaneously
my being-sexed and his being-sexed, my body as sex and his
body. Here therefore in order to decide the nature and onto-
logical position of sex we are referred to the study of desire.
What therefore is desire?
And first, desire of what?
We must abandon straight off the idea that desire is the
desire of pleasure or the desire for the cessation of a pain.
For we can not see how the subject could get out of this
state of immanence so as to “attach” his desire to an object.
Every subjectivist and immanentist theory will fail to explain
how we desire a particular woman and not simply our sexual
satisfaction. It is best therefore to define desire by its tran-
scendent object. Nevertheless it would be wholly inaccurate
to say that desire is a desire for “physical possession” of the
desired object — if by “possess” we mean here “to make love
to.” Of course the sexual act for a moment frees us from de-
sire, and in certain cases it can be posited explicitly as the
hoped-for issue of the desire — when desire, for example, is
paiMul and fatiguing. But in this case it is necessary that the
desire itself be the object which is posited as “to be over-
come,” and this can be accomplished only by means of a re-
flective consciousness. But desire by itself is non-reflective;
therefore it could never posit itself as an object to be over-
come. Only a roue represents his desire to himself, treats
it as an object, excites it, “turns it off,” varies the means
of assuaging it, etc. But in this case, we must observe, it is
the desire itself which becomes the desirable. The error here
501
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
stems from the fact that we have learned that the sexual act
suppresses the desire. We have therefore added on a bit of
knowledge to the desire and from outside we have added
pleasure as desire’s normal satisfaction — ^for reasons external
to the essence of desire {e.g., procreation, the sacred charac-
ter of maternity, the exceptional strength of the pleasure pro-
voked by ejaculation, the symbolic value attached to the sex-
ual act). Thus the average man through mental sluggishness
and desire to conform can conceive of no other goal for his
desire than ejaculation. This is what has allowed people to
conceive of desire as an instinct whose origin and end are
strictly physiological since in a man, for example, it would
have as its cause the erection and as its final limit the ejacula-
tion. But desire by itself by no means implies the sexual
act; desire does not thematically posit it, does not even sug-
gest it in outline, as one sees when it is a question of the
desire of very yoimg children or of adults who are ignorant
of the “technique” of love. Similarly desire is not a desire of
any special amorous practice; this is sufficiently proved by the
diversity of sexual practices, which vary with social groups.
In a general way desire is not a desire of doing. The “do-
ing” is after the event, is added on to the desire from out-
side and necessitates a period of apprenticeship; there is an
amorous technique which has its own ends and means. There-
fore since desire can not posit its suppression as its supreme
end nor single out for its ultimate goal any particular act,
it is purely and simply the desire of a transcendent object.
Here again we find that affective intentionality of which we
spoke in preceding chapters and which Scheler and Husserl
have described.
But what is the object of desire? Shall we say that desire
IS the desire of a body? In one sense this can not be denied.
But we must take care to understand this correctly. To be sure
ff IS the body which disturbs us: an arm or a half-exposed
breast or perhaps a leg. But we must realize at the start that
we desire the arm or the uncovered breast only on the
^ound of the presence of the whole body as an organic total-
body itself as totality may be hidden. I may see only
^ ^rm. But the body is there. It is from the standpoint
or the body that I apprehend the arm as an arm. The body
^ as much present, as adherent to the arm which I see as the
esigns of the rug, which are hidden by the feet of the table,
^0 present and adherent to those designs which I see. And
502
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
my desire is not mistaken; it is addressed not to a sum of
physiological elements but to a total form — better yet, to a
form in situation. A particular attitude, as we shall see later,
does much to provoke desire. Now along with the attitude
the surroundings are given and finally the .world. But here
suddenly we are at the opposite pole from a simple physio-
logical pruritus; desire posits the world and desires the body
in terms of the world and the beautiful hand in terms of the
body. There follows exactly the procedure which we described
in the preceding chapter, that by which we apprehend the
Other’s body from the standpoint of his situation in the
world. Moreover there is nothing in this which should sur-
prise us since desire is nothing but one of the great forms
which can be assumed by the revelation of the Other’s body.
Yet precisely for this reason we do not desire the body as a
purely material object; a purely material object is not in situa-
tion. Thus this organic totality which is immediately present
to desire is desirable only in so far as it reveals not only life
but also an appropriate consciousness. Nevertheless, as we
shall see, the Other’s being-in-situation which desire reveals
is of an entirely original type. Furthermore the consciousness
here considered is still only one property of the desired ob-
ject; that is, it is nothing but the sense of flow of the ob-
jects in the world, precisely in so far as this flow is cut off,
localized, and made a part of my world. To be sure, one can
desire a woman who is asleep, but one desires her in so far
as this sleep appears on the ground of consciousness. Con-
sciousness therefore remains always at the horizon of the
desired body; it makes the meaning and the unity of the
body. A living body as an organic totality in situation with
consciousness at the horizon: such is the object to which de-
sire is addressed. What does desire wish from this object?
We can not determine this until we have answered a pre-
liminary question: Who is the one who desires?
The answer is clear. 1 am the one who desires, and desire
is a particular mode of my subjectivity. Desire is conscious-
ness since it can be only as a non-positional consciousness of
itself. Nevertheless we need not hold that the desiring con-
sciousness differs from the cognitive consciousness, for exam-
ple, only in the nature of its object. For the For-itself, to
choose itself as desire is not to produce a desire while remain-
ing indifferent and unchanged — as the Stoic cause produces
its effect. The For-itself puts itself on a certain plane of exis-
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS 503
tence which is not the same, for example, as that of a For-
itself which chooses itself as a metaphysical bemg. Every
consciousness, as we have seen, supports a certain relation
with its own facticity. But this relation can vary from one
mode of consciousness to another. The facticity of a pain-
consciousness, for example, is a facticity discovered in a per-
petual flight. The case is not the same for the facticity of
desire. The man who desires exists his body in a particular
mode and thereby places himself on a particular level of exis-
tence. In fact everyone will agree that desire is not only long~
ing, a clear and translucent longing which directs itself through
our body toward a certain object. Desire is defined as trouble.
The notion of “trouble” can help us better to determine the
nature of desire. We contrast troubled water with transparent
water, a troubled look with a clear look. Troubled water re-
mains water; it preserves the fluidity and the essential charac-
teristics of water; but its translucency is “troubled” by an
inapprehensible presence which makes one with it, which is
everywhere and nowhere and which is given as a clogging of
the water by itself. To be sure, we can explain the troubled
quality by the presence of fine solid particles suspended in
the liquid, but this explanation is that of the scientist. Our
original apprehension of the troubled water is given us as
changed by the presence of an invisible something which is
not itseh distinguished and which is manifested as a pure
factual resistance. If the desiring consciousness is troubled,
it is because it is analogous to the troubled water.
To make this analogy precise, we should compare sexual
desire with another form of desire — for example, with hun-
ger. Hunger, like sexual desire, supposes a certain state of the
body, defined here as the impoverishment of the blood, abun-
dant salivary secretion, contractions of the tunica, etc. These
various phenomena are described and classified from the point
of view of the Other. For the For-itself they are manifested
as pure facticity. But this facticity does not compromise the
nature of the For-itself, for the For-itself immediately flees
h toward its possibles; that is, toward a certain state of satis-
fied-hunger which, as we have pointed out in Part Two, is
the In-itself-for-itself of hunger. Thus hunger is a pure sur-
passmg of corporal facticity; and to the extent that the For-
itself becomes conscious of this facticity in a non-thetic form,
For-itself becomes conscious of it as a surpassed facticity.
e body here is indeed the past, the passed-beyond.
504
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
In sexual desire, to be sure, we can find that structure com-
mon to all appetites — a state of the body. The Other can note
various physiological modifications (the erection of the penis,
the turgescence of the nipples of the breasts, changes in the
circulatory system, rise in temperature, etc.). The desiring
consciousness exists this facticity; it is in terms of this fac-
ticity — we could even say through it — that the desired body
appears as desirable. Nevertheless if we limited ourselves to
this description, sexual desire would appear as a distinct and
clear desire, comparable to the desire of eating and drink-
ing. It would be a pure flight from facticity toward other
possibles. Now everyone is aware that there is a great abyss
between sexual desire and other appetites. We all know the
famous saying, “Make love to a pretty woman when you
want her just as you would drink a glass of cold water when
you are thirsty.” We know also how unsatisfactory and even
shocking this statement is to the mind. This is because when
we do desire a woman, we do not keep ourselves wholly out-
side the desire; the desire compromises me; I am the accom-
plice of my desire. Or rather the desire has fallen wholly into
complicity with the body. Let any man consult his own ex-
perience; he knows how consciousness is clogged, so to speak,
by sexual desire; it seems that one is invaded by facticity, that
one ceases to flee it and that one slides toward a passive con-
sent to the desire. At other moments it seems that facticity
invades consciousness in its very flight and renders conscious-
ness opaque to itself. It is like a yeasty tumescence of fact..
The expressions which we use to designate desire sufficient-
ly show its specificity. We say that it tahes hold of you, that
it overwhelms you, that it paralyzes you. Can one imagine
employing the same words to designate hunger? Can one think
of a hunger which “would overwhelm” one? Strictly speaking,
this would be meaningful only when applied to impressions of
emptiness. But, on the contrary, even the feeblest desire is al-
ready overwhelming. One can not hold it at a distance as one
can with hunger and “think of something else” while keeping
desire as an undifferentiated tonality of non-thetic conscious-
ness which would be desire and which would serve as a
sign of the body-as-ground. But desire is consent to desire.
The heavy, fainting consciousness slides toward a languor
comparable to sleep. Everyone has been able to observe the
appearance of desire in another. Suddenly the man who desires
becomes a heavy tranquillity which is frightening, his eyes
505
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
are fixed and appear half-closed, his movements are stamped
with a heavy and sticky sweetness; many seem to be falling
asleep. And when one “struggles against desire,” it is precisely
this languor which one resists. If one succeeds in resisting it,
the desire before disappearing will become wholly distinct and
clear, like hunger. And then there will be “an awakening.”
One will feel that one is lucid but with heavy head and beating
heart. Naturally all these descriptions are inexact; they show
rather the way in which we interpret desire. However they
indicate the primary fact of desire; in desire conscious-
ness chooses to exist its facticity on another plane. It no
longer flees it; it attempts to subordinate itself to its own
contingency — as it apprehends another body — i.e., another
contingency — as desirable. In this sense desire is not only
the revelation of the Other’s body but the revelation of my
own body. And this, not in so far as this body is an instru-
ment or a point of view, but in so far as it is pure facticity;
that is, a simple contingent form of the necessity of my-
contingency. I feel my skin and my muscles and my breath,
and I'feel them not in order to transcend them toward some-
thing as in emotion or appetite but as a living and inert
datum, not simply as the pliable and discrete instrument of
my action upon the world but as a passion by which I am
engaged in the world and in danger in the world. The-For-
itself is not this contingency; it continues to exist but it
experiences the vertigo of its own body. Or, if you prefer,
this vertigo is precisely its way of existing its body. The
non-thetic consciousness allows itself to go over to the body,
wishes to be the body and to be only body. In desire the
body, instead of being only the contingency which the For-
itself flee's toward possibles which are peculiar to it, becomes
at the same time the most immediate possible of the For-itself. '
Desire is not only the desire of the Other’s body; it is — ^within
the unity of a single act — the non-thetically lived project of
being swallowed up in the body. Thus the final state of sexual
desire can be swooning as the final stage of consent to the
body. It is in this sense that desire can be called the desire of
one body for another body. It is in fact an appetite directed
toward the Other’s body, and it is lived as the vertigo of the
For-itself before its own body. The being which desires is
consciousness making itself body.
But granted that desire is a consciousness which makes
506 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
itself body in order to appropriate the Other’s body -appre-
hended as an organic totality in situation with conscious-
ness on the horizon — ^what then is the meaning of desire?
That is, why does consciousness make itself body — of vainly
attempt to do so — and what does it expect from the object
of its desire? The answer is easy if we realize that in desire
I make myself flesh in the presence of the Other in order
to appropriate the Other’s flesh. This means that it is not
merely a question of my grasping the Other’s shoulders or
thighs or of my drawing a body over against me; it is nec-
essary as well for me to apprehend them with this particular
instrument which is the body as it produces a clogging of
consciousness. In this sense when I grasp these shoulders,
it can be said not only that my body is a means for touching
the shoulders but that the Other’s shoulders are a means
for my discovering my body as the fascinating revelation
of facticity — that is, as flesh. Thus desire is the desire to
appropriate a body as this appropriation reveals to me my
body as flesh. But this body which I wish to appropriate,
I wish to appropriate as flesh. Now at first the Other’s body is
not flesh for me; it appears as a synthetic form in action.
As we have seen, we can not perceive the Other’s body as
pure flesh; that is, in the form of an isolated object maintain-
ing external relations with other thises. The Other’s body is
originally a body in situation; flesh, on the contrary, appears
as the pure contingency of presence. Ordinarily it is hidden by
cosmetics, clothing, etc.; in particular it is hidden by move-
ments. Nothing is less “in the flesh” than a dancer even though
she is nude. Desire is an attempt to strip the body of its move-
ments as of its clothing and to make it exist as pure flesh; it
is an attempt to incarnate the Other’s body. '
It is in this sense that the caress is an appropriation of the
Other’s body. It is evident that if caresses were only a strok-
ing or brushing of the surface, there could be no relation
between them and the powerful desire which they claim
to fulfill; they would remain on the surface like looks and
could not appropriate the Other for me. We know well the
deceptiveness of that famous expression, “The contact of two
epidermises.” The caress does not want simple contact; jt
seems that man alone can reduce the caress to a contact, and
then he loses its unique meaning. This is because the caress
is not a simple stroking; it is a shaping. In caressing the
S07
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
Other I cause her’' flesh to be bom beneath my caress, under
my fingers. The caress is the ensemble of those rituals which
incarnate the Other. But, someone will object, was the Other
not already incarnated? To be precise, no. The Other’s flesh
did not exist explicitly for me since I grasped the Other’s
body in situation; neither did it exist for her since she
transcended it toward her possibilities and toward the object.
The caress causes the Other to be born as flesh for me and
for herself. And by flesh we do not mean a part of the body
such as the dermis, the connective tissues or, specifically,
epidermis; neither need we assume that the body will be “at
rest” or dozing although often it is thus that its flesh is best
revealed. But the caress reveals the flesh by stripping the
body of its action, by cutting it off from the possibilities
which surround it; the caress is designed to uncover the web
of inertia beneath the action — i.e., the pure “being-there” —
which sustains it. For example, by clasping the Other’s hand
and caressing it, I discover underneath the act of clasping,
which this hand is at first, an extension of flesh and bone
which can be grasped; and similarly my look caresses when it
discovers underneath this leaping which is at first the dancer’s
legs, the curved extension of the thighs. Thus the caress is in
no way distinct from the desire: to caress with the eyes and to
desire are one and the same. Desire is expressed by the caress
as thought is by language. The caress reveals the Other’s
flesh as flesh to myself and to the Other. But it reveals this
flesh in a very special way. To take hold of the Other re-
veals to her her inertia and her passivity as a transcendence-
transcended;- but this is not to caress her. In the caress it is
not only my body as a synthetic form in action which caresses
the Other; it is my body as flesh which causes the Other’s
flesh to be born. The caress is designed to cause the
Other’s body to be born, through pleasure, for the Other —
and for myself — as a touched passivity in such a way that
uiy body is made flesh in order to touch the Other’s body
with its own passivity; that is, by caressing itself with the
Other’s body rather than by caressing her. This is why amor-
ous gestures have a language which could almost be said to
be studied; it is not a question so much of taking hold of
a part of the Other’s body as of placing one’s own body
L pronouns in French are masculine because they refer to autrul
(the Other) which may stand for either man or woman but which, gram-
matically, is masculine. The feminine sounds more natural in English.
508
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
against the Other’s body. Not so much to push or to touch
in the active sense but to place against. It seems that I lift
my own arm as an inanimate object and that I place it
against the flank of the desired woman, that my fingers which
I run over her arm are inert at the end of my hand. Thus the
revelation of the Other’s flesh is made through my own flesh;
in desire and in the caress which expresses desire, I incarnate
myself in order to realize the incarnation of the Other. The
caress by realizing the Other’s incarnation reveals to me my
own incarnation; that is, I make myself flesh in order to impel
the Other to realize for-herself and for me her own flesh,
and my caresses cause my flesh to be born for me in so far as
it is for the Other flesh causing her to be born as flesh. I make
her enjoy my flesh through her flesh in order to compel her
to feel herself flesh. And so possession truly appears as a
double reciprocal incarnation. Thus in desire there is an at-
tempt at the incarnation of consciousness (this is what we
called earlier the clogging of consciousness, a troubled con-'
sciousness, etc.) in order to realize the incarnation of the
Other.
It remains to determine what is the motive of desire — or
if you prefer, its meaning. For anyone who has so far followed
the descriptions which we have here attempted will have
understood long before this that for the For-itself, to be is to
choose its way of being on the ground of the absolute contin-
gency of its being-there. Desire therefore does not come to
consciousness as heat comes to the piece of iron which I hold
near the flame. Consciousness chooses itself as desire. For this,
of course, there must be a motive; I do not desire just any-
thing at any time. But p we showed in Part One of this book,
the motive is raised in terms of the past, and consciousness,
by turning back upon it, confers on the motive its weight and
its value. There is therefore no difference between the choice
of the motive of the desire and the meaning of the upsurge —
in the three ekstatic dimensions of duration — of a conscious-
ness which makes itself desiring. This desire — like emotions
or the imagining attitude or in general all the attitudes of the
For-itself — has a meaning which constitutes it and surpasses
it. The description which we have just attempted would
hold no interest if it did not lead us to pose a further
question: why does consciousness nihilate itself in the form
of desire?
One or two preliminary observations will help us in reply-
509
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
ing to this question. In the first place we must note that the
desiring consciousness does not desire its object on the
ground of a world which is unchanged. In other words, it is
not a question of causing the desirable to appear as a certain
“this” on the ground of a world which would preserve its
instrumental relations with us and its organization in com-
plexes of instrumentality. The same is true of desire as of
emotion. We have pointed out elsewhere that emotion is not
apprehension of an exciting object in an unchanged world;
rather since it corresponds to a global modification of con-
sciousness and of its relations to the world, emotion ex-
presses itself by means of a radical alteration of the world.®
Similarly sexual desire is a radical modification of the For-it-
self; since the For-itself makes itself be on another plane of
being, it determines itself to exist its body differently, to
make itself be clogged by its facticity. Correlatively the world
must come into being for the For-itself in a new way. There
is a world of desire. If my body is no longer felt as the
instrument which can not be utilized by any instrument — i.e.,
as the synthetic organization of my acts in the world — ff it is
lived as flesh, then it is as a reference to my flesh that I appre-
hend the objects in the world. This means that I make myself
passive in relation to them and that they are revealed to me
from the point of view of this passivity, in it and through it
(for passivity is the body, and the body does not cease to be
a point of view). Objects then become the transcendent en-
semble which reveals my incarnation to me. A contact with
them is a caress; that is, my perception is not the utilization
of the object and the surpassing of the present in view of an
end, but to perceive an object when I am in the desiring
attitude is to caress myself with it. Thus I am sensitive not so
much to the form of the object and to its instrumentality, as
to its inatter (gritty, smooth, tepid, greasy, rough, etc.). In
my desiring perception I discover something like a flesh of
objects. My shirt rubs against my skin, and I feel it. What is
ordinarily for me an object most remote becomes the immedi-
ately sensible; the warmth of air, the breath of the wind, the
rays of sunshine, etc.; all are present to me in a certain way,
^ posited upon me without distance and revealing my flesh
y means of their flesh. From this point of view desire is not
only the clogging of a consciousness by its facticity; it is
correlatively the ensnarement of a body by the world. The
Cf. Esqulsse d'lme tMorie des emotions. 1939 .
510
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
world is made ensnaring; consciousness is engulfed in a body
which is engulfed in the world.'-* Thus the ideal which is pro-
posed here is being-in-the-midst-of-the-world; the For-itself
attempts to realize a being-in-the-raidst-of-the-world as the
ultimate project of its being-in-the-world; that is why sensual
pleasure is so often linked with death — which is also a
metamorphosis or “being-in-the-midst-of-the-world. ’ There is,
for example, the theme of “pseudo-death” so abundantly
treated in all literatures.
But desire is not first nor primarily a relation to Ae
world. The world here appears only as the ground for explicit
relations with the Other. Usually it is on the occasion of the
Other’s presence that the world is revealed as the world of
desire. Accessorily it can be revealed as such on the occasion
of the absence of a particular Other or even on the occasion
of the absence of all Others. But we have already observed
that absence is a concrete existential relation between the
Other and me, which appears on the original ground of Being-
for-others. I can, of course, by discovering my body in soli-
tude, abruptly realize myself as flesh, “suffocate” with desire,
and experience the world as “suffocating.” But this solitary
desire is an appeal to either a particular Other or the presence
of the undifferentiated Other. I desire to be revealed as flesh
by means of and for another flesh. I try to cast a spell over the
Other and make him appear; and the world of desire indi-
cates by a sort of prepared space the Other whom I am call-
ing. Thus desire is by no means a physiological accident, an
itching of our flesh which may fortuitously direct us on the
Other’s flesh. Quite the contrary, in order for my flesh to
exist and for the Other’s flesh to exist, consciousness naust
necessarily be preliminarily shaped in the mould of desire.
This desire is a primitive mode of our relations with the Other
which constitutes the Other as desirable flesh on the ground
of a world of desire. ,
We are now in a position to make explicit the profound
meaning of desire. In the primordial reaction to the Other s
look I constitute myself as a look. But if I look at his look in
order to defend myself against the Other’s freedom and to
® Naturally it is necessary to take into account here as everywhere the
coeflicient of adversity in things. These objects are not only “caressing.” But
within the general perspective of the caress, they can appear also as "anti-
caresses”; that is, with a rudeness, a cacophony, a harshness which — precisely
because we are in the state of desire — offend us in a way that is unbearable-
511
CONCRETE RELATIONS -WITH OTHERS
transcend it as freedom, then both the freedom and the look
of the Other collapse. I see eyes; I see a being-in-the-midst-
of-the-world. Henceforth the Other escapes me. I should like
to act upon his freedom, to appropriate it, or at least, to make
the Other’s freedom recognize my freedom. But this freedom
is death; it is no longer absolutely in the world in which I en-
counter the Other-as-object, for his . characteristic is to be
transcendent to the world. To be sure, I can grasp the Other,
grab hold of him, knock him down. I can, providing I have
the power, compel him to perform this or that act, to say cer-
tain words. But everything happens as if I wished to get hold
of a man who runs away and leaves only his coat in my hands.
It is the coat, it is the outer shell which I possess. I shall
never get hold of more than a body, a psychic object in the
midst of the world. And although all the acts of this body can
be interpreted in terms of freedom, I have completely lost the
key to this interpretation; I can act only upon a facticity. If
I have preserved my awareness of a transcendent freedom in
the Other, this awareness provokes me to no purpose by in-
dicating a reality which is on principle beyond my reach and
by revealing to me every instant the fact that I am missing it,
that everything which I do is done “blindly” and takes on a
meaning elsewhere in a sphere of existence from which I am
on principle excluded. I can make the Other beg for mercy
or ask ray pardon, but I shall always be ignorant of what this
submission means for and in the Other’s freedom.
Moreover at the same time my awareness is altered; I lose
the exact comprehension of heing-looked-at, which is, as we
, know, the only way in which I can make proof of the Other’s
, freedom. Thus I am engaged in an enterprise the meaning of
; which I have forgotten. I am dismayed confronting this Other
^ as^ I see him and touch him but am at a loss as to what to do
' with him. It is exactly as if I had preserved the vague
memory of a certain Beyond which is beyond what I see and
I touch, a Beyond concerning which I know that this is
precisely what I want to appropriate. It is now that I make
H desire. Desire is an attitude aiming at enchantment,
u ^ grasp the Other only in his objective facticity, the
problem is to ensnare his freedom within this facticity. It is
ji °®c^sary that he be “caught” in it as the cream is caught
by a person skimming milk. So the Other’s For-itself
i play on the surface of his body, and be extended
ail through his body; and by touching this body I should
512
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
finally touch the Other’s free subjectivity. This is the true
meaning of the word possession. It is certain that I want to
possess the Other’s body, but I want to possess it in so far as
it is itself a “possessed”; that is, in so far as the Other’s con-
sciousness is identified with his body. Such is the impossible
ideal of desire: to possess the Other’s transcendence as pure
transcendence and at the same time as body, to reduce the
Other to his simple facticity because he is then in the midst
of my world but to bring it about that this facticity is a per-
petual appresentation of his nihilating transcendence.
But in truth the Other’s facticity (his pure being-there)
can not be given to my intuition without a profound modi-
fication of my own unique being. In so far as I surpass my
personal facticity toward my own possibilities, so far as I
exist my facticity in an impulse of flight, I surpass as well not
only the Other’s facticity but also the pure existence of things.
In my very upsurge I cause them to emerge in instrumental
existence; their pure and simple being is hidden by the com-
plexity of indicative references which constitute their manage-
ability and their instrumentality. To pick up a fountain pen is
already to surpass my being-there toward the possibility of
writing, but it is also to surpass the pen as a simple existent
toward its potentiality and once again to surpass this poten-
tiality toward certain future existents which are the “words-
about-to-be-formed” and finally the “book-about-to-be-wnt-
ten.” This is why the being of existents is ordinarily veiled
by their function. The same is true for the being of the
Other. If the Other appears to me as a servant, as an employee,
as a civil servant, or simply as the passerby whom I must
avoid or as this voice which is speaking in the next room and
which I try to understand (or on the other hand, which I
want to forget because it “keeps me from sleeping”), it is,
not only the Other’s extra-mundane transcendence which es-
capes me but also his “being-there” as a pure contingent exis-
tence in the midst of the world. This is because it is exactly in
so far as I treat him as a servant, or as an office clerk, that I
surpass his potentialities (transcendence-transcended, dead-
possibilities) by the very project by which I surpass and ni-
hilate my own facticity. If I want to return to his simple pres-
ence and taste it as presence, it is necessary for me to reduce
myself to my own presence. Every surpassing of my being'
^ere is in fact a surpassing of the Other’s being-there. And
if the world is around me as the situation which I surpass
1 1
t
a.
si
U’
Oj'
513
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
toward myself, then I apprehend the Other in terms of his
situation; that is, already as a center of reference.
Of course the desired Other must also be apprehended
in situation: I desire a woman in the world, standing near a
table, lying naked on a bed, or seated at my side. But if the
desire flows back from the situation upon the being who is in
situation, it is in order to dissolve the situation and to corrode
the Other's relations in the world. The movement of desire
which goes from the surrounding “environment” to the de-
sired person is an isolating movement which destroys the en-
vironment and cuts off the person in question in order to
effect the emergence of his pure facticity. But this is possible
only if each object which refers me to the person is fixed in
its pure contingency at the same time that it indicates him to
me; consequently this return movement to the Other’s being
is a movement of return to myself as pure being-there. I de-
stroy my possibilities in order to destroy those of the world
and to constitute the world as a “world of desire”; that is, as
a destructured world which has lost its meaning, a world in
which things jut out like fragments of pure matter, like brute
qualities. Since the For-itself is a choice, this is possible only
if I project myself toward a new possibility: that of being
“absorbed by my body as ink is by a blotter,” that of being
reduced to my pure being-there. This project, inasmuch as it iS'
not simply conceived and thematically posited but rather lived
— that is, inasmuch as its realization is not distinct from its
conception — is “disturbance” or “trouble.” Indeed we must
not understand the preceding descriptions as meaning that I
deliberately put myself in a state of disturbance with the pur-
pose of rediscovering the Other’s pure “being-there.” Desire
IS a lived project which does not suppose any preliminary
deliberation but which includes within itself its meaning and
its interpretation. As soon as I throw myself toward the
! Other’s facticity, as soon as I wish to push aside his acts and
! his functions so as to touch him in his flesh, I incarnate my-
!■ self, for I can neither wish nor even conceive of the incarna-
i tion of the Other except in and by means of my own incar-
{ nation. Even the empty outline of a desire (as when one
f, absentmindedly “undresses a woman with one’s look”) is
an empty outline of troubled disturbance, for I desire only
; with my trouble, and I disrobe the Other only by disrobing
,i; myself; I foreshadow and outline the Other’s flesh only by
outlinmg my own flesh.
514
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
But my incarnation is not only the preliminary condition
of the appearance of the Other as flesh to my eyes. My goal is
to cause him to be incarnated as flesh in his own eyes. It is
necessary that I drag him onto the level of pure facticity; he
must be reduced for himself to being only flesh. Thus I shall
be reassured as to the permanent possibilities of a transcen-
dence which can at any instant transcend me on all sides. This
transcendence will be no more than this; it will remain en-
closed within the limits of an object; in addition and because
of this very fact, I shall be able to touch it, feel it, possess it.
Thus the other meaning of my incarnation — that is, of my
troubled disturbance — is that it is a magical language. I make
myself flesh so as to fascinate the Other by my nakedness and
to provoke in her the desire for my flesh — exactly because
this desire will be nothing else in the Other but an incarna-
tion similar to mine. Thus desire is an invitation to desire. It
is my flesh alone which knows how to find the road to the
Other’s flesh and I lay my flesh next to her flesh so as to
awaken her to the meaning of flesh. In the caress when I
slowly lay my inert hand against the Other’s flank, I am mak-
ing that flank feel my flesh, and this can be achieved only if it
renders itself inert. The shiver of pleasure which it feels is
precisely the awakening of its consciousness as flesh. If I ex-
tend my hand, remove it, or clasp it, then it becomes again
body in action; but by the same stroke I make my hand dis-
appear as flesh. To let it run indifferently over the length of
her body, to reduce my hand to a soft brushing almost
stripped of meaning, to a pure existence, _ to a pure matter
slightly silky, slightly satiny, slightly rough — this is to give up '
for oneself being the one who establishes references and un-
folds distances; it is to be made pure mucous membrane. At
thi§ moment the communion of desire is realized; each con- ^
sciousness by incarnating itself has realized the incarnation of !
the other; each one’s disturbance has caused disturbance to
be born in the Other and is thereby so much enriched. By
each caress I experience my own flesh and the Other’s flesh
through my flesh, and I am conscious that this flesh which I
feel and appropriate through my flesh is flesh-realized-by-the
Other. It is not by chance that desire while a imin g at the body ^
as a whole attains it especially through masses of flesh which *
are very little differentiated, grossly nerveless, hardly capable
of spontaneous movement, through breasts, buttocks, thighs,
stomach: these form a sort of image of pure facticity. This is ^
515
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
why also the true caress is the contact of two bodies in their
mostly fleshy parts, the contact of stomachs and breasts; the
caressing hand is too delicate, too much like a perfected in-
strument. But the full pressing together of the flesh of two
people against one another is the true goal of desire.
Nevertheless desire is itself doomed to failure. As we
have seen, coitus, which ordinarily terminates desire, is not
its essential goal. To be sure, several elements of our sexual
structure are the necessary expression of the nature of desire,
in particular the erection of the penis and the clitoris. This is
nothing else in fact but the afihrmation of the flesh by the
flesh. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that it should not be
accomplished voluntarily; that is, that we can not use it as
an instrument but that we are dealing with a biological and
autonomous phenomenon whose autonomous and involuntary
expression accompanies and signifies the submerging of con-
sciousness in the body. It must be clearly understood that no
fine, prehensile organ provided with striated muscles can be a
sex organ, a sex. If sex were to appear as an organ, it could be
only one manifestation of the vegetative life. But contingency
reappears if we consider that there are sexes and particular
sexes. Consider especially the penetration of the female by the
male. This does, to be sure, conform to that radical incarna-
tion which desire wishes to be. (We may in fact ob-
serve the organic passivity of sex in coitus. It is the whole
body which advances and withdraws, which carries sex for-
ward or withdraws it. Hands help to introduce the penis;
the penis itself appears as an instrument which one man-
ages, which one makes penetrate, which one withdraws, which
one utilizes. And similarly the opening and the lubrication
of the vagina can not be obtained voluntarily.) Yet coitus
remains a perfectly contingent modality of our sexual life. It
IS as much a pure contingency as sexual pleasure proper. In
truth the ensnareraent of consciousness in the body normally
has its^ own peculiar result — ^that is, a sort of particular ecstasy
in which consciousness is no more than consciousness (of)
the body and consequently a reflective consciousness of cor-
I Pleasure in fact — ^like too keen a pain — motivates
• the appearance of reflective consciousness which is “attention
f to pleasure.’*
I pleasure is the death and the failure of desire. It is the
i *^®sire because it is not only its fulfillment but its
lumt and its end. This, moreover, is only an organic contin-
516 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
gency: it happens that the incarnatioE is manifested by erec-
tion and that the erection ceases with ejaculation. But in ad-
dition pleasure closes the sluice to desire because it motivates
the appearance of a reflective consciousness of pleasure, whose ^
object becomes a reflective enjoyment; that is, it is attention
to the incarnation of the For~itself which is refiected-on and
by the same token it is forgetful of the Other’s incarnation.
Here we are no longer within the province of contingency.
Of course it remains contingent that the passage to the fas-
cinated reflection should be effected on the occasion of that
particular mode of incarnation which is pleasure (although
there are numerous cases of passage to the reflective without
the intervention of pleasure), but there is a permanent dan-
ger for desire in so far as it is an attempt at incarnation. This
is because consciousness by incarnating itself loses sight of the
Other’s incarnation, and its own incarnation absorbs it to the
point of becoming the ultimate goal. In this case the pleasure <
of caressing is transformed into the pleasure of being '
caressed; what the For-itself demands is to feel within it its j
own body expanding to the point of nausea. Immediately
there is a rupture of contact and desire misses its goal. It i
happens very often that this failure of desire motivates a
passage to masochism; that is, consciousness apprehending it-
self in its facticity demands to be apprehended and tran-
scended as body-for-the-Other by means of the Other’s con-
sciousness. In this case the Other-as-object collapses, the
Other-as-look appears, and my consciousness is a conscious-
ness swooning in its flesh beneath the Other’s look.
Yet conversely desire stands at the origin of its own fail-
ure inasmuch as it is a desire of taking and of appropriating- j
It is not enough merely that troubled disturbance should effect i
the Other’s incarnation; desire is ihe desire to appropriate this j
incarnated consciousness. Therefore desire is naturally con-
tinued not by caresses but by acts of taking and of penetra-
tion. The caress has for its goal only to impregnate the Other’s
body with consciousness and freedom. ISlow it is necessary to
take this saturated body, to seize it, to enter into it. But by
the very fact that I now attempt to seize the Other’s body, to
pull it toward me, to grab hold of it, to bite it, my own body
ceases to be flesh and becomes again the synthetic instrument
■which I am. And by the same token the Other ceases to be an
incarnation; she becomes once more an instrument in the
midst of the world which I apprehend in terms of its situa-
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
517
tion. Her consciousness, which^played on the surface of her
flesh and which I tried to taste with my flesh, disappears
under my sight; she remains no more than an object with
object-images inside her. At the same time my disturbance
disappears. This does not mean that I cease to desire but that
desire has lost its matter; it has become abstract; it is a desire
to handle and to take. I insist on taking the Other’s body but
my very insistence makes my incarnation disappear. At pres-
ent I surpass my body anew toward my own possibilities (here
^the possibility of taking), and similarly the Other’s body
which is surpassed toward its potentialities falls from the level
of flesh to the level of pure object. This situation brings about
the rupture of that reciprocity of incarnation which was pre-
cisely the unique goal of desire. The Other may remain
troubled; she may remain flesh for herself, and I can under-
stand it. But it is a flesh which I no longer apprehend through
my flesh, a flesh which is no longer anything but the property
of an Other-as-object and not the incarnation of an Other-as-
consciousness. Thus I am body (a synthetic totality in situa-
tion) confronting a flesh. I find myself in almost the same sit-
uation as that from which I tried to escape by means of desire;
that is, I try to use the object-Other so as to make her deliver
her transcendence, , and precisely because she is all object
she escapes me with all her transcendence. Once again I
have even lost the precise comprehension of what I seek
and yet I am engaged in the search. I take and discover
mysjelf in the process of taking, but what I take in my hands is
something else than what I wanted to take. I feel this and I
suffer from it but without being capable of saying what I
wanted to take; for along with my troubled disturbance the
very comprehension of my desire escapes me. I am like a
sleepwalker who wakens to find himself in the process of
gripping the edge of the bed while he can not recall the
nightmare which provoked his gesture. It is this situation
which is at the origin of sadism.
Sadism is passion, barrenness, and tenacity. It is tenacity
because it is the state of a For-itself which apprehends itself
as engaged without understanding in what it is engaged and
which persists in its engagement without having a clear con-
sciousness of the goal which it has set for itself or a precise
recollection of the value which it has attached to this engage-
10 Dona Prouheze (Soulier de Satin, //« journSe): “II ne connaitra pas
le goQt que fai.” (He will not know the taste which I have.)
518
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ment. It is barrenness because it appears when desire is
emptied of its trouble. The sadist has reapprehended his body
as a synthetic totality and center of action; he has resumed the
perpetual flight from his own facticity. He experiences himself
in the face of the Other as pure transcendence. He has a
horror of troubled disturbance for himself and considers it a
humiliating state; it is possible also that he simply can not
realize it in himself. To the extent that he coldly persists, that
he is at once a tenacity and a barrenness the sadist is im-
passioned. His goal, like that of desire, is to seize and to
make use of the Other not only as the Other-as-object but as a
pure incarnated transcendence. But in sadism the emphasis
is put on the instrumental appropriation of the incamated-
Other. The “moment” of sadism in sexuality is the one in
which the incarnated For-itself surpasses its own incarnation
in order to appropriate the incarnation of the Other. Thus
sadism is a refusal to be incarnated and a flight from aU facti-
city and at the same time an effort to get hold of the Other’s
facticity. But as the sadist neither can nor will realize the
Other’s incarnation by means of his own mcarnation, as due
to this very fact he has no resource except to treat the
Other as an instrumental-object, he seeks to utilize the Other’s
body as a tool to make the Other realize an incarnated ex-
istence. Sadism is an effort to incarnate the Other through
violence, and this incarnation “by force” must be already the
appropriation and utilization of the Other. Sadism like desire
seeks to strip the Other of the acts which hide him. It seeks
to reveal the flesh beneath the action. But whereas tlxe For-
itself in desire loses itself in its own flesh in order -to reveal
to the Other that he too is flesh, the sadist refuses his" own
flesh at the same time that he uses instruments to reveal by
force the Other’s flesh to him. The object of sadism is imme-
diate appropriation. But sadism is a blind alley, for it not
only enjoys the possession of the Other’s flesh but at the same
time in direct connection with this flesh, it enjoys its own
non-incarnation. It wants the non-reciprocity of sexual rela-
tions, it enjoys being a free appropriating power confronting
a freedom captured by flesh. That is why the sadist wants to
make the flesh present to the Other’s consciousness differently-
He wants to make it present by treating the Other as an instru-
ment; he makes it present in pain. In pain facticity invades
consciousness, and ultimately the reflective consciousness
is fascinated by the ' facticity of the unreflective conscious-
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
519
ness. There is then indeed an incarnation through pain. But at
the same time the pain is procured by means of instruments.
The body of the torturing For-itself is no longer anything
more than an instrument for giving pain. Thus from the start
the For-itself can give itself the illusion of getting hold of the
Other’s freedom instrumentally; that is, of plunging this free-
dom into flesh without ceasing to be flie one who provokes,
who grabs hold, who seizes, etc.
As for the type of incarnation which sadism would like
to realize, this is precisely what is called the Obscene. The
obscene is a species of Being-for-Others which belongs to the
genus of the ungraceful. But not everything which is un-
graceful is obscene. In grace the body appears as a psychic
being in situation. It reveals above all its transcendence as a
transcendence-transcended; it is in act and is understood in
terms of the situation and of the end pursued. Each move-
ment therefore is apprehended in a perceptive process which
in the present is based on the future. For this reason the grace-
ful act has on the one hand the precision of a finely perfected
machine and on the other hand the perfect unpredictability of
the psychic since, as we have seen, the psychic is for ofliers
the unpredictable object. Therefore the graceful act is at each
instant perfectly understandable in so far as one considers
that in it which has elapsed. Better yet, that part of the act
which has elapsed is implied by a sort of aesthetic necessity,
which stems from its perfect adaptation. At the same time
the goal to come illiuninates the act in its totality. But all the
future part of the act remains unpredictable although upon
the very body of the act it is felt that the future will appear
as necessary and adapted once it too has elapsed. It is this.
moving image of necessity and of freedom (as the property of
the Other-as-object) which, strictly speaking, constitutes
grace. Bergson has given a good description of it. In grace the
body is the instrument which manifests freedom. The grace-
ful act, in so far as it reveals the body as a precision instru-
ment, furnishes it at each instant with its justification for
existing; the hand is in order to grasp and manifests at the
start its being-in-order-to-grasp. In so far as it is apprehended
m terms of a situation which requires grasping, the hand
appears as itself required in its being, as summoned. And in so
far as it manifests its freedom through the unpredictability of
Its gesture, it appears at the origin of its being. It seems that
the hand is itself produced as the result of a justifying
520
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
appeal from the situation. Grace therefore forms an objective
image of a being which would be the foundation of itself in
order to . Facticity then is clothed and disguised by
grace; the nudity of the flesh is wholly present, but it can not
be seen. Therefore the supreme coquetry and the supreme
challenge of grace is to exhibit the body unveiled with no
clothing, with no veil except grace itself. -The most graceful
body is the naked body whose acts enclose it with an invisible
garment while entirely disrobing its flesh, while the flesh is
totally present to the eyes of the spectators.
The ungraceful, on the contrary, appears when one of the
elements of grace is thwarted in its realization. A movement
may become mechanical. In this case the body always forms
part of an ensemble which justifies it but in the capacity of a
pure instrument; its transcendence-transcended disappears, and
along with it the situation disappears as the lateral , over-
determination of the instrumental-objects of my universe. It
can happen also that the actions are abrupt and violent; in
this case it is the adaptation of the situation which collapses;
the situation remains but an hiatus slips in like an emptiness
between it and the Other in situation. Im this case the Other
remains free, but this freedom is apprehended only as pure
unpredictability; it resembles the clinamen of Epicurean
atoms, in short an indeterminism. At the same time the end
remains posited, and it is always in terms of the future that we
perceive the Other’s gesture. But the fall from adaptation in-
volves this consequence, that the perceptive interpretation by
means of the future is always too broad or too^ narrow; it is
approximate interpretation. Consequently the justification of
the gesture and the being of the Other is imperfectly realized.
In the final analysis the awkward is unjustifiable; all its facti-
city, which was engaged in the situation, is absorbed by it,
flows back upon it. The awkward one frees his facticity in-
opportunely and suddenly plac^ it beneath our sight; hence
where we expected to seize a key to the situation, spontane-
ously emanating from the very situation, we suddenly en-
counter the unjustifiable contingency of aii unadapted pres-
ence; we are put face to face with the existence of an existent
Nevertheless if the body is wholly within the act, the
facticity is not yet flesh. The obscene appears when the body
adopts postures which entirely strip it of its acts and which
reveal the inertia, of its flesh. The sight of a naked body from
behind is not obscene. But certain involuntaiy waddlings
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS 521
of the rump are obscene. This is because then it is only the
legs which are acting for the walker, and the rump is like
an isolated cushion which is carried by the legs and the
balancing of which is a pure obedience to the laws of weight.
It can not be justified by the situation; on the contrary, it is
entirely destructive of any situation since it has the passivity
of a thing and since it is made to rest like a thing upon the
legs. Suddenly it is revealed as an unjustifiable facticity; it is
de trop like every contingent It is isolated in the body for
which the present meaning is walking; it is naked even if
material covers it, for it no longer shares in the transcendepce-
transcended of the body in action. Its movement of balancing
instead of being interpreted in terms of what is to come is
interpreted and known as a physical fact in terms of the past.
These remarks naturally can apply to cases in which it is the
whole body which is made flesh, either by some sort of flabbi-
ness in its movements, which can not be interpreted by the
situation, or by a deformity in its structure (for example the
proliferation of the fat cells) which exhibits a super-abun-
dant facticity in relation to the effective presence which the
situation demands. This revealed flesh is specifically obscene
when it is revved to someone who is not in a state of desire
and without exciting his desire. A particular lack of adaptation
which destroys the situation at the very moment when I appre-
hend it and which releases to me the inert expanding of flesh
as an abrupt appearance beneath the thin clothing of the
movements which cover it (when I am not in a state of desire
for this flesh) : this is what I shall call the obscene.
Now we can see the meaning of the sadist’s demand;
grace reveals freedom as a property of the Other-as-object
and refers obscurely — ^just as do the contradictions in the
sensible world in the case of Patonic recollection — to a tran-
scendent Beyond of which we preserve only a confused
memory and which we can reach only by a radical modifica-
tion of our being; that is, by resolutely assuming our being-
for-others. Grace both unvefls and veils the Other’s flesh, or
ff you prefer, it unveils the flesh in order immediately to veil
it; in grace flesh is the inaccessible Other. The sadist aims at
destroying grace in order actually to constitute another syn-
thesis of the Other. He wants to make the Other’s flesh
appear; and in its very appearance the flesh will destroy grace,
and facticity will reabsorb the Other’s freedom-as-object.
This reabsorption is not annihilation; for the sadist it is the
522 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Other-as-free who is manifested as flesh. The identity of the
Other-as-object is not destroyed through these avatars, but the
relations between flesh and freedom are reversed. In grace
freedom contained and veiled facticity; in the new synthesis
to be effected it is facticity which contains and hides freedom.
The sadist aims therefore at making the flesh appear abruptly
and by compulsion; that is, by the aid not of his own flesh
but of his body as instrument. He aims at making the Other
assume attitudes and positions such that his body appears
under the aspect of the obscene; thus the sadist himself re-
mains on the level of instrumental appropriation since he
causes flesh to be born by exerting force upon the Other, and
the Other becomes an instrument in his hands. The sadist
handles the Other’s body, leans on the Other’s shoulders so
as to bend him toward the earth and to make his haunches
stick up, etc. On the other hand, the goal of this instrumental
utilization is immanent m the very utilization; the sadist treats
the Other as an instrument in order to make the Other’s flesh
appear. The sadist is the being who apprehends the Other as
the instrument whose function is his own incarnation. The
ideal of the sadist will therefore be to achieve the moment
when the Other will be already flesh without ceasing to be an
instrument, flesh to cause the birth of flesh, the moment at
which the thighs, for example, already offer themselves in an
obscene expanding passivity, and yet are instruments which
are managed, which are pushed aside, which are bent so as to
make the buttocks stick out in order in turn to incarnate
them. But let us not be deceived here. What the sadist thus so
tenaciously seeks, what he wants to knead with hi's hands
and bend under his wrists is the Other’s freedom. The free-
dom is there in that flesh; it is freedom which is this flesh
since there is a facticity of the Other. It is therefore this free-
dom which the sadist tries to appropriate.
Thus the sadist’s effort is to ensnare the Other in his flesh
by means of violence and pain, by appropriating the Other’s
body in such a way that he treats it as flesh so as to cause
flesh to be bom. But this appropriation surpasses the body
which it appropriates, for its purpose is to possess the body
only in so far as the Other’s freedom has been ensnared with-
in it. This is why the sadist will want manifest proofs of this
enslavement of the Other’s freedom through the flesh. He
will aim at making the Other ask for pardon, he will use tor-
ture and threats to force the Other to humiliate himself, to
- 523 -
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
deny what he holds most dear. It is often said that this is done
through the will to dominate or thirst for power. But this
explanation is either vague or absurd. It is the will to
dominate which should be explained first. This can not be
prior to sadism as its foundation, for in the same way and on
the same plane as sadism, it is born from anxiety in the face of
the- Other. In fact; if the sadist is pleased upon obtaining a
denial by mieans of torture, this is for a reason analogous to
that which allows us to interpret the meaning of Love. We
have seen in fact that Love does not demand the abolition of
the Other’s freedom but rather his enslavement as freedom;
that is, freedom’s self-enslavement. Similarly the sadist does
not seek to suppress the freedom of the one whom he
tortures but to force this freedom freely to identify itself with
the tortured flesh. This is why the moment of pleasure for the
torturer is that in which die victim betrays or humiliates
himself.
In fact no matter what pressure is exerted on the victim,
the abjuration remains free; it is a spontaneous production,
a response to a situation; it manifests human-reality. No matter
what resistance the victim has offered, no matter how long
he has waited before begging for mercy, he would have been
able despite all to wait ten minutes, one minute, one second
longer. He has determined the moment at which the pain be-
came unbearable. The proof of this is the fact that he will
later live out his abjuration in remorse and shame. Thus he is
entirely responsible for it. On the other hand the sadist for his
part considers himself entirely the cause of it. If the victim
resists and refuses to beg for mercy, the game is only that
much more pleasing. One more turn of the screw, one extra
twist and the resistance will finally give in. The sadist posits
himself as “having all the time in the world.” He is calm,
he does not hurry. He uses his instruments like a technician;
he tries them one after another as the locksmith tries various
keys in a keyhole. He enjoys this ambiguous and contradictory
situation. On the one hand indeed he is the one who patiently
at the heart of universal determinism employs means in view
of an end which will be automatically attained — just as the
lock will automatically open when the locksmith finds the
right” key; on the other hand, this determined end can be
realized only with the Other’s free and complete cooperation.
Therefore until the last the end remains both predictable
and unpredictable. For the sadist the object realized is am-
524
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
biguous, contradictory, without equilibrium since it is both
the strict consequence of a technical utDization of determinism
and the manifestation of an unconditioned freedom. The
spectacle which is offered to the sadist is that of a freedom
which struggles against the expanding of the flesh and which
finally freely chooses to be submerged in the flesh. At the
moment of the abjuration the result sought is attained: the
body is wholly flesh, panting and obscene; it holds the posi-
tion which the torturers ' have given to it, not that which it
would have assumed by itself; the cords which bind it hold it
as an inert thing, and thereby it has ceased to be the object
which moves spontaneously- In the abjuration a freedom
chooses to be wholly identified with- this body; this distorted
and heaving body is the very image of a broken and enslaved
freedom.
These few remarks do not aim at exhausting the problem
of sadism. We wanted only to show that it is as a seed in
desire itself, as the failure of desire; in fact as soon as I seek to
take the Other’s body, which through my incarnation I have
induced to incarnate itself, I break the reciprocity of incarna-
tion, I surpass my body toward its own possibilities, and I .
orient myself in the direction of sadism. Thus sadism and
masochism are the two reefs on which desire may founder —
whether I surpass my troubled disturbance toward an appro-
priation of the Other’s flesh or, intoxicated with my own
trouble, pay attention only to my flesh and ask nothing of the
Other except that he should be the look which aids me in
realizing my flesh. It is because of this inconstancy on the part
of desire and its perpetual oscillation between these two perils
that “normal” sexuality is commonly designated as “sadistic-
masochistic.”
Nevertheless sadism too — ^like blind indifference and like
desire — bears within itself the cause of its own failure. In the
first place there is a profound incompatibility between the
apprehension of the body as flesh and its instrumental utiliza-
tion. If I make an instrument out of flesh, it refers me to
other instruments and to potentialities, in short to a future; it
is partially justified in its being-there by the situation which
I create around myself, just as the presence of nails and of a
picture to be nailed on the wall justifies the existence of the
hammer. Suddenly the body’s character as flesh — that is, its
unutihzable facticity— gives way to that of an instrumental-
thing. The complex “flesh-as-instrument” which the sadist
525
CONCRETE RELATIONS WiTH OTHERS
has attempted to create disintegrates. This profound ^s-
integration can be hidden so long as 'the fleshy is the m-
strument to reveal flesh, for in this way I constitute ^ in-
strument with, an immanent end. But when the incarnation is
achieved, when I have indeed before me a panting body,
then I no longer know how to utilize this flesh. No goal
can be assigned to it, precisely because I have effected the
appearance of its absolute contingency. It is there, and it is
there for nothing. As such I can not get hold of it as flesh; I
can not integrate it in a complex, system of instrumentality
without its materiality as flesh, its “fleshliness” immediately
escaping me. I can only remain disconcerted before it in a
state of contemplative astonishment or else incarnate myself
in turn and allow myself again to be troubled, so as to place
myself once more at least on the level where flesh is revealed
to flesh in its entire “fleshliness.” Thus sadism at the very mo-
ment when its goal is going to be attained gives way to de-
sire. Sadism is the failure of desire, and desire is the failure of
sadism. One can get out of the circle only by means of satia-
tion and so-called “physical possession.” In this a new syn-
thesis of sadism and of desire is given. The tumescence of sex
manifests incarnation, the fact of “entering into” or of being
“penetrated” symbolically realizes the sadistic and masochistic
attempt to appropriate. But if pleasure enables us to get out
of the circle, this is because it kills both the desire and the
sadistic passion without satisfying them.
At the same time and on a totally different level sadism
harbors a new motive for failure. "V^at the sadist seeks to
appropriate is in actuality the transcendent freedom of the
victim. But this freedom remains on principle out of reach,
^d the more the sadist persists in treating the other as an
instrument, the more this freedom escapes him. He can act
upon the freedom only by making it an objective property of the
Other-as-object; that is, on freedom in the midst of the world
with its dead-possibilities. But since the sadist’s goal is to
recover his being-for-others, he misses it on principle, for the
omy Other with whom he has to do is the Other in the world
h^ “images in his head” of the sadist assaulting
sadist discovers his error when his victim looks at him;
that IS, when the sadist experiences the absolute alienation of
nis bemg in the Other’s freedom; he realizes then not only
mat he has not recovered his being-outside but also that the
526
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
activity by which he seeks to recover it is itself transcended
and fixed in “sadism” as an habitus and a property with its
cortege of dead-possibilities and that this transformation takes
place through and for the Other whom he wishes to enslave.
He discovers then that he can not act on the Other’s freedom
even by forcing the Other to humiliate himself and to beg for
mercy, for it is precisely in and through the Other’s absolute
freedom that there exists a world in which there are sadism
and instruments of torture and a hundred pretexts for being
humiliated and for foreswearing oneself. Nobody has better
portrayed the power of the victim’s look at his torturers than
Faulkner has done in the final pages of Light in August. The
“good citizens” have just hunted down the Negro, Christ-
mas, and have castrated him. Christmas is at the point of
death:
“But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay
there, with his eyes open and empty of everything save '
consciousness, and with something, a shadow, about his
mouth. For a long moment he looked up at them with
peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his
face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself
and from out the slashed garments about his hips and
loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released
breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the
rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast
the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories for-
ever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peace-
ful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams
of old age, in the mirroring face of whatever children
they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It
will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not
particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself
alone triumphant. Again from the town, deadened a little
by the walls, the scream of the siren mounted toward its
unbelievable crescendo, passing out of the realm of
hearing.”ii
Thus this explosion of the Other’s look in the world of
the sadist causes the meaning and goal of sadism to collapse.-
Tr. The italics are Sartre’s. I have quoted directly from Faulkner rather
translating back into English from the French translation which Sartre
used, wilham Faulkner, Light in August. New York: Modern Library, p. 407.
527
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
The sadist discovers that it was that freedom which he
wished to enslave, and at the same time he realizes the futility
of his efforts. Here once more we are referred from the being-
in-the-act-of-looking to the being-looked-at; we have not got
out of the circle.
We have not thought by these few remarks to exhaust the
problem of sex, still less that of possible attitudes toward the
Other. We have wished simply to show that the sexual attitude
is a primary behavior toward the Other. It goes without say-
ing that this behavior necessarily includes within it the orig-
inal contingency of being-for-others and that of our own
facticity. But we can not admit that this behavior is subject
from the start to a physiological and empirical constitution.
As soon as “there is” the body and as soon as “there is” an
Other, we react by desire, by Love, and by the derived atti-
tudes which we have mentioned. Our physiological structure
only causes the symbolic expression, on the level of absolute
contingency, of the fact that we are the permanent possibility
of assuming one or the other of these attitudes. Thus we shall
be able to say that the For-itself is sexual in its very upsurge in
the face of the Other and that through it sexuality comes into
the world.'
Obviously we do not claim that all attitudes toward the
Other are reducible to those sexual attitudes which we have
just described. If we have dealt with them at considerable
length, it is for two reasons: first because they are fundamen-
tal, and second because all of men’s complex patterns of con-
duct toward one another are only enrichments of these two
original attitudes (and of a third — hate — which we are
going to describe next) . Of course examples of concrete con-
duct (collaboration, conflict, rivalry, emulation, engagement,
obedience, etc.)^^ are infinitely more delicate to describe, for
they depend on the historic situation and the concrete partic-
ularities of each relation of the For-itself with the Other; but
they all include as their skeleton — so to speak — sexual rela-
tions. This is not because of the existence of a certain libido
wMch would slip in everywhere but simply because the atti-
tudes which we have described are the fundamental projects
by which the For-itself realizes its being-for-others and tries to
transcend this factual situation.
This is not the place to show what of love and desire can
e contained in pity, admiration, disgust, envy, gratitude, etc.
Also maternal love, pity, kindness, etc.
528 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS . ,
But each man will be able to determine it by referring to his
own experience, as well as to the eidetic intuition of these
various essences. Naturally this does not mean that these
different attitudes are simply disguises borrowed by sexuality.
But it must be understood that sexuality is integrated in them
as their foundation and that they include and surpass it just
as the notion of a circle includes and surpasses that of a ro-
tating line segment, one of whose extremities is fixed. These
fundamental-attitudes can remain hidden just as a skeleton is
veiled by the flesh which surrounds it; in fact this is what
usually happens. The contingency of bodies, the structure of
the original project which I am, the history which I his-
toricize can usually determine the sexual attitude to remain im-
plicit, inside more complex conduct. For example, it is only
seldom that one explicitly desires an Other “of the same sex.”
But behind the prohibitions of morality and the taboos of
society the original structure remains, at least in that particular
form of “trouble” which is called sexual disgust And it is not
necessary to understand this permanence of the sexual proj-
ect as if it dwelt “within us” in the unconscious state. A
project of the For-itself can exist only in conscious form. It
exists as integrated with a particular structure in which it is
dissolved. This is what psychoanalysts have had in mind when
they have made of sexual affectivity a tabula rasa deriving
all its determinations from the individual history. Only it is
not necessary to hold that sexuality at its origin is undeter-
mined; in fact it includes all its determinations from the mo-
ment of the upsurge of the For-itself into a world where
“there are” Others. What is undetermined and what must be
fixed by each one’s history is the particular type of relation
with the Other in which the sexual attitude (desire-love,
masochism-sadism) will be manifested in its explicit purity.
It is precisely because these attitudes are original that we
have chosen them in order to demonstrate the circle of rela-
tions with the Other. Since these attitudes are in fact inte-
grated in all attitudes toward Others, they involve in their
circularity the integrality of ail conduct toward the Other.
Just as Love finds its failure within itself and just as Desire
arises from the death of Love in order to collapse in turn
and give way to Love, so all the patterns of conduct toward
the Other-as-object include within themselves an implicit and
veiled reference to an Other-as-subject, and this reference is
t eir death. Upon the death of a particular conduct toward
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS - - S29
the Other-as-object arises a new attitude which aims at
getting hold of the Other-as-subject, and this in turn reveals
its instability and collapses to give way to the opposite con-
duct. Thus we are indefinitely referred from the Other-as-ob-
ject to the Other-as-subject and vice versa. The movement is
never arrested, and this movement with its abrupt reversals of
direction constitutes our relation with the Other. At whatever
moment a person is considered, he is in one or the other of
these attitudes — unsatisfied by the one as by the other. We can
maintain ourselves for a greater or less length of time in the
attitude adopted depending on our bad faith or depending
on the particular circumstances of our history. But never will
either attitude be sufficient in itself; it always points ob-
scurely in the direction of its opposite. This means that we
can never hold a consistent attitude toward the Other unless
he is simultaneously revealed to us as subject and as object, as
transcendence-transcending and as transcendence-transcended
— ^which is on principle impossible. Thus ceaselessly tossed
from being-a-look to being-looked-at, falling from one to the
other in alternate revolutions, we are always, no matter what
attitude is adopted, in a state of instability in relation to the
Other. We pursue the impossible ideal of the simultaneous
apprehension of his freedom and of his objectivity. To borrow
an expression from Jean Wahl, we are — in relation to the
Other — sometimes in a state of trans-descendence (when we
apprehend him as an object and integrate him with the
world), and sometimes in a state of trans-ascendence (when
we experience him as a transcendence which transcends us).
But neither of these two states is sufficient in itself, and we
shall never place ourselves concretely on a plane of equality;
that is, on “the plane where the recognition of the Other’s free-
dom would involve the Other’s recognition of our freedom.
The Other is on principle inapprehensible; he flees me
when I seek him and possesses me when I flee him. Even if
I should want to act according to the precepts of Kantian
morality and take the Other’s freedom as an unconditioned
end, still this freedom would become a transcendence-tran-
scended by the mere fact that I make it my goal. On the
other hand, I could act for his benefit only by utilizing the
Other-as-object as an instrument in order to realize this free-
dom. It would be necessary, in fact, that I apprehend the
Other in situation as an object-instrument, and my sole power
would be then to modify the situation in relation to the Other
530 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
and the Other in relation to the situation. Thus I am brought
to that paradox which is the perilous reef of all liberal politics
and which Rousseau has defined in a single word; I must
“force” the Other to be free. Even if this force is not always
nor even very frequently exercised in the form of violence,
nevertheless it still governs the relations of men with each
other. If I offer comfort and reassurance, it is in order to dis-
engage the Other’s freedom from the fears or griefs which
darken it; but consolation or reassuring argument is the or-
ganization of a system of means to an end and is designed to
act upon the Other and consequently to integrate him in turn
as an instrumental-thing in the system. Furthermore the com-
forter effects an arbitrary distinction between the freedom
which he is identifying with the use of Reason and the pur-
suit of the Good, on the one hand, and the affliction which
appears to him the result of a psychic determinism. Therefore
the problem is to separate the freedom from the affliction as
one separates out each of two components of a chemical
product. By the sole fact that the comforter is considering
freedom as capable of being separated out, he transcends it
and does violence to it, and he can not on the level where he
is placed apprehend this truth: that it is freedom itself which
makes itself the affliction and that consequently to act so as to
free freedom from affliction is to act against freedom.
It does not follow, however, that an ethics of “laissez-
faire” and tolerance would respect the Other’s freedom any
better. From the moment that I exist I establish a fac-
tual limit to the Other’s freedom. I am this limit, and each
of my projects traces the outline of this limit around the
Other. Charity, laissez-faire, tolerance — even an attitude of
abstention — are each one a project of myself which engages
me and 'which engages the Other in his acquiescence. To
realize tolerance with respect to the Other is to cause the
Other to be thrown forcefully into a tolerant world. It is to
remove from him on principle those free possibilities of
courageous resistance, of perseverance, of self-assertion which
he would have had the opportunity to develop in a world
of intolerance. This fact is made still more manifest if we
consider the. problem of education: a severe education treats
thp child as an instrument since it tries to bend him by
force to values which he has not admitted, but a liberal
education in order to make use of other methods nevertheless
chooses a priori principles and values in the name of which
531
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
the child will be trained. To train the child by persuasion
and gentleness is no less to compel him. Thus respect for
the Other’s freedom is an empty word; even if we could
assume the project of respecting this freedom, each attitude
which we adopted with respect to the Other would be a
violation of that freedom which we claimed to respect The
extreme attitude which would be given as a total indifference
toward the Other is not a solution either. We are already
thrown in the world in the face of the Other; our upsurge
is a free limitation of his freedom and nothing — not even
suicide — can change this original situation. Whatever our
acts may be, in fact, we- must accomplish them in a world
where there are already others and where I am de trap in
relation to others. .
It is from this singular situation that the notion of guilt
and of sin seems to be derived. It is before the Other that
I am guilty. I am guilty first when beneath the Other’s look
I experience my alienation and my nakedness as a fall from
grace which I must assume. This is the meaning of the fa-
mous line from Scripture: “They knew that they were naked.”
Again I am guilty when in turn I look at the Other, because
by the very fact of my own self-assertion I constitute him
as an object and as an instrument, and I cause him to ex-
perience that same alienation which he must now assume.
Thus original sin is my upsurge in a world where there
are others; and whatever may be my further relations with
others, these relations will be only variations on the original
theme of my guilt.
But this guilt is accompanied by helplessness without this
helplessness ever succeeding in cleansing me of my guilt.
Whatever I may do for the Other’s freedom, as we have seen,
.my efforts are reduced to treating the Other as an instrument
and. to positing his freedom as a transcendence-transcended.
,But on the other hand, no matter what compelling power
I use, I shall never touch the Other save in his being-as-
object. I shall never be able to accomplish anything except
to furnish his freedom with occasions to manifest itself with-
out my ever succeeding in increasing it or diminishing it,
in directing it or in getting hold of it. Thus I am guilty
toward the Other in my very being because the upsurge ,of
my being, in spite of itself, bestows on the Other a new dimen-
sion of being; and on the other handT am powerless either
to profit from my fault or to rectify it.
532 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
A for-itself which by historicizing itself has experienced
these various avatars can determine, with full knowledge of
the futility of its former attempts, to pursue the death of
the Other. This free determination is called hate. It implies
a fundamental resignation; the for-itself abandons its claim
to realize any union with the Other; it gives up using the
Other as an instrument to recover its own being-in-itself.
It wishes simply to rediscover a freedom without factual
limits; that is, to get rid of its own inapprehensible being-
as-object-for-the-Other and to abolish its dimension of
alienation. This is equivalent to projecting the realization
of a world in which the Other does not exist. The for-it-
self which hates consents to being only for-itself; instructed
by its various experiences of the impossibility of making use
of its being-for-others, it prefers to be again only a free
nihilation of its being, a totality detotalized, a pursuit which
assigns to itself its own ends. The one who hates projects no
longer being an object; hate presents itself as an absolute
positing of the freedom of the for-itself before the Other.
This is why hate does not abase the hated object, for it
places the dispute on its true level. What I hate in the
Other is not this appearance, this fault, this particular
action. What I hate is his existence in general as a tran-
scendence-transcended. This is why hate implies a recogni-
tion of the Other’s freedom. But this recognition is abstract
and negative; hate knows only the Other-as-object and at-
taches itself to this object. It wishes to destroy this object
in order by the same stroke to overcome the transcendence
which haunts it. This transcendence is only dimly sensed as
an inaccessible beyond, as the perpetual possibility of the
alienation of the for-itself which hates. It is therefore never
apprehended for itself; moreover it could not be so without
becoming an object. I experience it as a perpetually fleeing
character in the Other-as-object, as a “not-given,” “undevel-
oped” aspect of his most accessible empirical qualities, as
a sort of perpetual threat which warns me that “I am missing
the point.” This is why one hates right through the revealed
psychic but not the psychic itself; this is why also it is indif-
ferent whether we hate the Other’s transcendence through
what we empirically call his vices or his virtues. What I hate
IS the^ whole psychic-totality in so far as it refers me to the
ther s transcendence. I do not lower myself to hate my
particular objective detail. Here we find the distinction be-
533
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
tweea hating, and' despising. And hate, does not necessarily
appear on the occasion of my being subjected to something
evil. On the contrary, it can arise when one would theoretically
expect gratitude — that is, on the occasion of a kindness. The
occasion which arouses hate is simply an act by the Other
which puts me in the state of being subject to his freedom.-
This act is in itself humiliating; it is humiliating as the con-
crete revelation of my instrumental object-ness in the face
of the Other’s freedom. This revelation is immediately ob-
scured, is buried in the past and becomes opaque. But it
leaves in me the feeling that there is “something” to be
destroyed^ if I am to free myself. This is the reason, more-
over, why gratitude is so close to hate; to be, grateful for
a kindness is to recognize that the Other was entirely free
in acting as he has done. No compulsion, not even that of
duty, has determined him m it. He is wholly responsible for
his act and for the values which have presided over its ac-
complishment. I, myself, have been only the excuse for it,
the matter on which his act has been exercised. In view of
this recognition the for-itself can project love or hate as it
chooses; it can no longer ignore the Other.
The second consequence of these observations is that hate
is the hate of all Others in one Other. What I want to at-
tain symbolically' by pursuing the death of a particular Other
is the general principle of the existence of others. The Other
whom I hate actually represents all Others. My project of
suppressing him is a project of suppressing others in general;
that is, of recapturing my non-substantial freedom as for-itself.
In hate there is given an understanding of the fact that my
dimension of being-alienated is a real enslavement which
comes to me through others. It is the suppression of this
enslavement which is projected. That is why hate is a black
feeling; that is, a feeling which aims at the suppression of
an Other and which qua project is consciously projected
against the disapproval of others. I disapprove of the hate
which one person bears toward another; it makes me uneasy
and I seek to suppress it because although it is not explicit-
y aimed at me, I know that it concerns me and that it is
realized against me. And in fact it aims at destroying me not
in so far as it would seek to suppress me but in so far as it
prmcipally lays claim to my disapproval in order to pass be-
yond It. Hate demands to be hated — so that to hate is
534 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
equivalent to an uneasy recognition of the freedom of
the one who hates.
But hate too is in turn a failure. Its initial project is to
suppress other consciousnesses. But even if it succeeded in
this — i.e., if it could at this moment abolish the Other —
it could not bring it about that the Other had not been.
Better yet, if the abolition of the Other is to be lived as the
triumph of hate, it implies the explicit recognition that the
Other has existed. Immediately my being-for-others by slip-
ping into the past becomes an irremediable dimension of
myself. It is what I have to be as having-been-it. Therefore
I can not free myself from it. At least, someone will say,
I escape it for the present, I shall escape it in the future.
But no. He who has once been for-others is contaminated
in his being for the rest of his days even if the Other should
be entirely suppressed; he will never cease to apprehend his
dimension of being-for-others as a permanent possibility
of his being. He can never recapture what he has alienated;,
he has even lost all hope of acting on this alienation and
turning it to his own advantage since the destroyed Other
has carried the key to this alienation along with him to the
grave. What I was for the Other is fixed by the Other’s
death and I shall irremediably be it in the past I shall be
it also and in the same way in the present if I persevere in
the attitude, the projects, and the mode of life which have
been judged by the Other. The Other’s death constitutes
me as an irremediable object exactly as my own death would
do. Thus the triumph of hate is in its very upsurge trans-
formed into failure. Hate does not enable us to get out of
the circle. It simply represents the final attempt, the attempt
of despair. After the failure of this attempt nothing remains ,
for the for-itself except to re-enter the circle and allow itself
to be indefinitely tossed from one to the other of the two
fundamental attitudes.^®
III. “BEING-WITH” (MITSEIN) AND THE “WE”
Doubtless someone will want to point out to us that our
description is incomplete since it leaves no place for cer-
tain concrete experiences in which we discover ourselves
** These considerations do not exclude the possibility of an ethics of
deliverance and salvation. But this can be achieved only after a radical
Sion which we can not discuss here.
535
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
not in conflict with the Other but in community with him.
And it is true that we frequently use the word “we.” The
very existence and use of this grammatical form necessarily
refers us to a^real experience of the Mitsein. “We” can be
subject and in this form it is identical with the plural of
the “I.” To be- sure, the ' parallel between grammar and
thought is in many cases more than doubtful; in fact, the
question should be revised completely and the relation of
language to thought studied from an entirely new approach.
Yet it is nonetheless true that the “we” subject does not
appear even conceivable unless it refers at least to the thought
of a plurality of subjects which would simultaneously appre-
hend one another as subjectivities, that is, as transcendences-
transcending and not as transcendence-transcended. If the
word “we” is not simply a flatus vocis, it denotes a concept
subsuming an infin ite variety of possible experiences. And
these experiences appear a priori to contradict the experience
of my being-as-object for the Other and the experience of
the Other’s being-as-object for me. In the “we,” nobody is the
object. The “we” includes a plurality of subjectivities which
recognize one another as subjectivities. Nevertheless this rec-
ognition is not the object of an explicit thesis; what is explicit-
ly posited is a common action or the object of a common
perception. “We” resist, “we” advance to the attack, “we” con-
demn the guilty, “we” look at this or that spectacle. Thus the
recognition of subjectivities is analogous to that of the self-
recognition of the non-thetic consciousness. More precisely,
it must be effected laterally by a non-thetic consciousness
whose thetic object is this or that spectacle in the world.
The best example of the “we” can be furnished us by the
spectator at a theatrical performance whose consciousness is
exhausted in apprehending the imaginary spectacle, in fore-
seeing the events through anticipatory schemes, in positing
imaginary beings as the hero, the traitor, the captive, etc.,
a spectator, who, however, in the very upsurge which makes
him a consciousness of the spectacle is constituted non-thet-
ically as consciousness (of) being a co-spectator of the
spectacle.^ Everyone knows in fact that unavowed embarrass-
ment which grips us in an auditorium half empty and, on
the other hand, that enthusiasm which is let loose and is
remforced in a full and enthusiastic hall. Moreover it is
certain that the experience of the we-as-subject can be man-
ifested in any circumstance whatsoever. I am on the pavement
536 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
in front of a cafe; I observe the other patrons and I know
myself to be observed. We remain here in the most ordinary
case of conflict with others (the Other’s being-as-object for
me, my being-as-object for the Other). But suddenly some
incident occurs in the street; for example, a slight collision
between a jeep and a taxi. Immediately at the very instant
when I become a spectator of the .incident, I experience my
self non-thetically as engaged in “we.” The earlier rivalries,
the slight conflicts have disappeared, and the consciousnesses
which furnished the matter of the “we” are precisely those
of all the patrons: “we” look at the event, “we” take part. It is
this unanimity which Romains wanted to describe in Vie
unanime or in Vin blanc de la Villette. Here we are brought
back again to Heidegger’s Mitsein. Was it worthwhile then
to criticize it earlier?^^
We shall only remark here that we had no intention of
casting doubt on the experience of the “we.” We limited
ourselves to showing that this experience could not be the
foundation of our consciousness of the Other. It is clear,
in fact, that it could not constitute an ontological structure
of human reality; we have proved that the existence of the
for-itself in the midst of others was at its origin a metaphysi-
cal and contingent fact. In addition it is clear that the “we”
is not an inter-subjective consciousness nor a new being
which surpasses and encircles its parts as a synthetic whole
in the manner of the collective consciousness of the sociolo-
gists. The “we” is experienced by a particular consciousness;
it is not necessary that all the patrons at the cafe should be
conscious of being “we” in order for me to experience my-
self as being engaged in a “we” with them. Everyone is fa-
miliar with this pattern of everyday dialogue: “We are very
dissatisfied.” “But no, my dear, speak for yourself.” This
implies that there are aberrant consciousnesses of the “we”— -
which as such are nevertheless perfectly normal conscious-
nesses. If this is the case, then in order for a consciousness
to get the consciousness of being engaged in a “we,”
it is necessary that the other consciousnesses which enter into
community with it should be first given in some other way;
that is, either in the capacity of a transcendence-transcending
or as a transcendence-transcended. The “we” is a certain par-
ticular experience which is produced in special cases on the
** Part Three, Chapter One.
537
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
foundation of being-for-others in general. The being-for-
others precedes and founds the being-with-others.
Furthermore the philosopher who wants to study the
“we” must take precautions and know of what he speaks.
There is not only a We-as-subject; grammar teaches' us that
there is also a We-as-compleraent — i.e., a We-as-object.^® Now
from all which has been said up till now it is easy to
understand that the “we” in “We are looking at them” can
not be on the same ontological plane as the “us” in “They
are looking at us.” There is no question here of subjectivi-
ties qua subjectivities. In the sentence, “They are looking
at me," I want to indicate that I experience myself as an
object for others, as an alienated Me, as a transcendence-
transcended. If the sentence,' “They are looking at us,” is to
indicate a real experience, it is necessary that in this exper-
ience I make proof of the fact that I am engaged with others
in a community of transcendences-transcended, of alienated
“Me’s.” The “Us” here refers to an experience of being-
objects in common. Thus there are two radically different
forms of the experience of the “we” and the two forms cor-
respond exactly to the being-in-the-act-of-looking and the
being-looked-at which constitute the fundamental relations
of the For-itself with the Other. It is these two forms of the
“we” which must be studied next.
A. The Us-Object
We shall begin by examining the second of these exper-
iences; its meaning can be grasped more easily and it will
perhaps serve as a means of approach to the study of the
Other. First we must note that the Us-object precipitates us
into the world; we experience it in shame as a community
alienation. This is illustrated by that significant scene in
which convicts choke with anger and shame when a beauti-
ful, elegantly dressed woman comes to visit their ship, sees
their rags, their labor, and their misery. We have here a
common shame and a common alienation. How then is it
possible to experience oneself as an object in a community
of objects? To answer this we must return to the fundamen-
tal characteristics of our being-for-others.
difference between English and French presents a certain
icuUy for the translator since nous in French is used for both subject
and object— I.e., »we” and “us.”
538 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Hitherto we have considered the simple case in which
I am alone confronting the Other who is also alone. In this
case I look at him- or he looks at me. I seek to transcend his
transcendence or I experience my own as transcended^ and I
feel my possibilities as dead-possibilities. We form a pair
and we are in situation each one in relation to the Other.
But this situation has objective existence only for the one
or the Other. There is no reverse side to our reciprocal rela-
tion. In our description we have not yet taken into account
the fact that my relation with the Other appears on the infinite
ground of my relation and of his relation to all Others;
that is, to the quasi-totality of consciousnesses. As a result my
relation to this Other, which I experienced earlier as the foun-
dation of my being-for-others, or the relation of the Other
to me can at each instant and according to the motives which
intervene be experienced as objects for Others. This will
be manifested clearly in the case of the appearance of a third
person. Suppose, for example, that the Other is looking at
me. At this moment I experience myself as wholly alienated,
and I assume myself as such. Now the Third comes on
the scene. If he looks at me, I experience them as forming
a community, as “They” (they-subject) through my alienation.
This “they” tends, as we know, toward the impersonal “some-
body” or “one” {on). It does not alter the fact that I am
looked at; it does not strengthen (or barely strengthens)
my original alienation. But if the Third looks at the Other
who is looking at me, the problem is more complex. I can
in fact apprehend the Third not directly but upon the Other,
who becomes the Other-looked-at (by the Third). Thus the
third transcendence transcends the transcendence which tran-
scends me and thereby contributes to disarming it. There is
constituted here a metastable state which will soon decom-
pose depending upon whether I ally myself to the Third so
as to look at the Other who is then transformed into
our object — and here I experience the ' We-as-subject of which
we will speak later — or whether I dook at the Third ^d
thus transcend this third transcendence which transcends
the Other. In the latter case the Third becomes an object in
my^ universe, his possibilities are dead-possibilities, he can not
deliver me from the Other. Yet he looks at the Other who
is looking at me. There follows a situation which we -shall
call indeterminate and inconclusive since I am an object for
the Other who is an- object for the Third who is an object
539
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
for me. Freedom alone, by supporting itself on one or the
other of these relations can give a structure to this situation.
But it can just as well happen that the Third looks at the
Other at whom I am looking. In this case I can look at
both of them and thus disarm the look of the Third. The
Third and the Other will appear to me then as They-as-objects
or “Them.” I can also grasp upon the Other the look
of the Third so that without seeing the Third I apprehend
upon the Other’s behavior the fact that he knows himself
to be looked-at. In this case I experience upon the Other and
apropos of the Other the Third’s transcendence-tran-
scending. The Third experiences it as a radical and absolute
alienation of the Other. The Other flees away from my world;
he no longer belongs to me; he is an object for another
transcendence. Therefore he does not lose his character as
an object, but he becomes ambiguous; he escapes me not by
means of his own transcendence but through the transcen-
dence of the Third, Whatever I can apprehend upon him and
concerning him at present, he is always Other, as many
times Other as there are Others to perceive him and think
about him. In order for me to reappropriate the Other for
myself, it is necessary for me to look at the Third and to
confer an object-state upon him. But in the first place, this is
not always possible; moreover the Third can be himself
looked at by other Thirds; that is, can be indefinitely the
Other whom I do not see. There results an original instability
in the Other-as-object and an infinite pursuit by the For-itself
which seeks to reappropriate this object-state. This is the
reason, as we have seen, why lovers seek solitude.
It is possible also for me to experience myself as looked-at
by the Third while I look at the Other. In this case I experi-
ence my alienation non-positionally at the same time that I
posit the alienation of the Other. My possibilities of utilizing
the Other as an instrument are experienced by me as dead-
possibilities, and my transcendence which prepares to tran-
scend the Other toward my own ends falls back into tran-
scendence-transcended. I let go my hold. The Other does not
thereby become a subject, but I no longer feel myself
qualified to keep him in an object-state. He becomes a neutral;
something which is purely and simply there and with which
have nothing to do. This will be the case, for example, if
1 am smprised in the process of beating and humiliating a
man helpless to defend himself. The appearance of the Third
540
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
“disconnects” me. The helpless man is no longer either “to be
beaten” or “to be humiliated”; he is nothing more than a pure
existence. He is nothing more, he is no longer even “a help-
less man.” Or if he becomes so again, this will be through the
Third serving as interpreter; / shall learn from the Third
that the Other was a helpless man (“Aren’t you ashamed? You
have attacked one who is helpless,” etc,) The quality of
helplessness will in my eyes be conferred on the Other by the
T hir d; it will no longer be part of my world but of a uni-
verse in which I am with the helpless man for the Third.
This brings us finally to the case with which we are pri-
marily concerned: I am engaged in a conflict with the Other.
The Third comes on the scene and embraces both of us with
his look. Correlatively I make proof of my alienation and my
object-ness. For the Other I am outside as an object in the
midst of a world which is not “mine.” But the Other whom
I was looking at or who was looking at me undergoes the same
modification, and I discover this modification of the Other
simultaneously with that which I experience. The Other is an
object in the midst of the world of the Third. Moreover this
object-state is not a simple modification of his being which is
parallel with that which I undergo, but the two object-
states come to me and to the Other in a global modification
of the situation in which I am and in which the Other finds
himself. Before the look of the Third appeared there were two
situations, one circumscribed by the possibilities of the Other
in which I was in the capacity of an instrument, and a reverse
situation circumscribed by my own possibilities and including
the Other. Each of these situations was the death of the other
and we could grasp the one only by objectivizing the other.
Now at the appearance of the Third I suddenly experience
the alienation of my possibilities, and I discover by the same
token that the possibilities of the Other are dead-possibilities.
The situation does not thereby disappear; but it flees outside
both my world and the Other’s world; it is constituted in ob-
jective form in the midst of a third world. In this third world
it is seen, judged, transcended, utilized, but suddenly there is
effected a leveling of the two opposed situations; there is no
longer any structure of priority which goes from me to the
Other or conversely from the Other to me since our possibili-
ties are equally dead-possibilities for the Third. This means
that I suddenly experience the existence of an objective sit-
uation-form in the world of the Third in which the Other and
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH-OTHERS 541
I shall figure as equivalent structures in solidarity with each
other. Conflict does not arise, m this objective situation,
from the free upsurge of our transcendences, but it is estab-
lished and transcended by the Third as a factual given which
defines us and holds us together. The Other’s possibility of
striking 'me and my possibility of defending myself, far from
being exclusive of one another, are now complementary to
each other, imply one another, and involve one another for the
Third by virtue of their being dead-possibilities, and this is
precisely what I experience non-thetically and' without having
any knowledge of it. Thus what I experience is a being-out-
side in which I am organized with the Other in an indis-
, soluble, objective whole, a whole in which I am fundamentally
no longer distinct from the Other but which I agree in soli-
darity with the Other to constitute. And to the extent that on
principle I ''assume my being-outside for the Third, I must
similarly assume the Other’s being-outside; what I assume is
a community of equivalence by means of which I exist en-
gaged in a form which like the Other I agree to constitute. In
a word I assume myself as engaged outside in the Other, and
I assume the Other as engaged outside in me.
I carry the fundamental assumption of this engagement
before me without apprehending it; it is this free recognition
of my responsibility as including the responsibility for the
Other which is the proof of the Us-bbject. Thus the Us-ob-
ject is never known in the sense that reflection releases to us
the knowledge of our Self, for example; it is never felt in the
sense that a feeling reveals to us a particular concrete object
as antipathetic, hateful, troubling, etc. Neither is it simply
experienced, for what is experienced is the pure situation of ^
solidarity with the Other. The Us-object is revealed to us
only by my assuming the responsibility for this situation;
that is, because of the internal reciprocity of the situation, I
must of- necessity — in the heart of my free assumption —
assume also the Other. Thus in the absence of any Third per-
son I can say, “I am fighting against the Other.” But as soon
as the Third appears, the Other’s possibilities and my own are
leveled into dead-possibilities and hence the relation becomes ^
reciprocal; I am forced to make proof of the fact that “we ”
each other.” In fact the statement, “I fight him
he fights me” would be plainly inadequate. Actually I
ugnt him because he fights me and reciprocally. The project
or combat has germinated in his mind as in mine, and for the
542
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Third it is united into a single project common to that
they-as-object which he embraced with his look and which
even constitutes the unifying synthesis of this “Them.”
Therefore I must assume myself as apprehended by the Third
as an integral part of the “Them.” And this “Them” which is
assumed by a subjectivity as its meaning-for-others becomes
the “Us.”
Reflective consciousness can not apprehend this “Us.” Its
appearance coincides on the contrary with the collapse of
the “Us”; the For-itself disengages itself and posits its self-
ness against Others. In fact it is necessary to conceive that
originally the belonging to the Us-object is felt as a^still more
radical alienation on the part of the For-itself since the latter
is no longer compelled only to assume what it is for the Other
but to assume also a totality which it is not although it forms
an integral part of it. In this sense the Us-object is an abrupt
experience of the human condition as engaged among Others
as an objectively established fact. The Us-object although
experienced on the occasion of a concrete solidarity and cen-
tered in this solidarity (I shall be ashamed precisely because
we have been caught in the act of fighting one another) has a
meaning which surpasses the particular circumstance in which
it is experienced and which aims at including my belonging
as an object to the human totedity (minus the pure conscious-
ness of the Third) which is equally apprehended as an object.
Therefore it corresponds to an experience of humiliation and
impotence; the one who experiences himself as constituting
an C/s with other men feels himself trapped among an infinity
of strange existences; he is alienated radically and without
recourse.
Certain situations appear more likely than others to
arouse the experience of the Us. In particular there is com-
munal work: when several persons experience themselves as
apprehended by the Third while they work in solidarity to
produce the same object, the very meaning of the manufac-
tured object refers to the working collectivity as to an “Us.”
The movement which I make and which is evoked by the
subsequent hoisting up has meaning only if it is preceded by
this movement on the part of my neighbor and followed by
t at movement on the part of that other workman. There re-
sults a form of the “Us” more easily accessible since it is the
reqmrement of the object itself and its potentialities and its
coeflicient of adversity which refer to us workmen as an Us-
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS 543
object: We have therefore experienced ourselves as appre-
hended as an “Us” across a material object “to be created.”
Materiality puts its seal on our solid community, and we
appear to ourselves as an instrumental disposition and tech-
nique of means, each one having a particular place assigned by
an end.
But if some situations thus appear empirically more
favorable to the upsurge of the “Us,” we must not lose sight
of the fact that every human situation, since it is an engage-
ment in the midst of others, is experienced as “Us” as soon
as the Third appears. If I am walking in the street behind this
rnq n and see only his back, I have with him the minimum of
technical and practical relations which can be conceived. Yet
once the Third looks at me, looks at the road, looks at the
Other, I am bound to the Other by the solidarity of the “Us”:
we are walking one behind the Other on la rue Blomet on a
July morning. There is always a point of view from which
diverse for-itselfs can be united in an “Us” by a look. Con-
versely just as the look is only the concrete manifestation of
the original fact of my existence for others, just as therefore
I experience myself existing for the Other outside any indi-
vidual appearance of a look, so it is not necessary that a con-
crete look should penetrate and transfix us in order for us to
be able to experience ourselves as integrated outside in an
“Us.” So long as the detotalized-totality “humanity” exists, it
is possible for some sort of plurality of individuals to experi-
ence itself as “Us” in relation to all or part of the rest of
men, whether these men are present “in flesh and blood” or
whether they are real but absent. Thus whether in the pres-
ence or in the absence of the Third I can always apprehend
myself either as pure selfness or as integrated in an “Us.” This
brings us to certain special forms of the “Us,” in particular
to that which we call “class consciousness.”
Class consciousness is evidently the assuming of a partic-
ular . Us” on the occasion of a collective situation more
pldnly structured than usual. It matters little here how we
detoe this situation; what interests us is only the nature of the
s which is assumed. If a society, so far as its economical
or political structure is concerned, is divided into oppressed
classes and oppressing classes, the situation of the oppressing
classes presents the oppressed classes with the image of a
perpetual Third who considers them and transcends them by
IS treedom. It is not the hard work, the low living standard,
544
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
or the privations endured which will constitute the oppressed
collectivity as a class. The solidarity of work, in fact, could
(as we shall see in the following section) constitute the
laboring collectivity as a “We-subject” in so far as this collec-
tivity — whatever may be the coefficient of adversity of things
— ^makes proof of itself as transcending the intra-mundane
objects toward its own ends. The living standard is a wholly
relative thing, and appreciation of it will vary according to
circumstances (it can be simply endured or accepted or de-
manded in the name of a common ideal). The privations if
considered in themselves have the result of isolating the per-
sons who suffer them rather than of uniting them and are in
general sources of conflict. Finally, the pure and simple com-
parison which the members of the oppressed collectivity can
make between the harshness of their conditions and the
privileges enjoyed by the oppressing classes can not in any
case suffice to constitute a class consciousness; at most it
will provoke individual jealousies or particular despairs; it
does not possess the possibility of unifying and of making
each one assume the responsibility for the unification. But the
ensemble of these characteristics as it constitutes the condition
of the oppressed class is not simply endured or accepted. It
would be equally erroneous, however, to say that from the
beginning it is apprehended by the oppressed class as im-
posed by the oppressing class. On the contrary, a long time
is necessary to construct and spread a theory of oppression.
And this theory will have only an explicative value. The pri-
mary fact is that the member of the oppressed collectivity,
who as a simple person is engaged in fundamental conflicts
with other members of this collectivity (love, hate, rivalry of
interests, etc.), apprehends his condition and that of other
members of this collectivity as looked-at and thought about
by consciousnesses which escape him;
The "master,” the “feudal lord,” the “bourgeois,” the
“capitalist” all appear not only, as powerful people who com-
mand but in addition and abovq- all Thirds; that is, as those
who are outside the oppressed community and for whom this
community exists. It is therefore for them and in their free-
dom that the reality of the oppressed class is going to exist.
They cause it to be born by their look. It is to them and
through them that there is revealed the identity of my con-
ffition and that of the others who are oppressed; it is for them
t at I exist in a situation organized with others and that my
545
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
possibles as dead-possibles are strictly equivalent with the
possibles o£ others; it is for them that 1 am a worker and it ts
through and in their revelation as the Other-as-a-looK that 1
experience myself as one among others. This means that 1
discover the “Us” in which I am integrated or “the class
outside, in the look of the Third, and it is this collective
alienation which I assume when saying “Us.” From this^point
of view the privileges of the Third and “our” burdens, ^ our
miseries have value at first only as a signification; they signify
the independence of the Third in relation to “Us* ; they pre-
sent our alienation to us more plainly. Yet as they are none-
theless endured, as in particular our work, our fatigue are
nonetheless suffered, it is across this endured suffering that
- I experience my being-looked-at-as-a-thing-engaged-in-a-
totality-of-things. It is in terms of my suffering, of my
misery that I am collectively apprehended with others by the
Third; that is, in terms of the adversity of the world, in terms
of the facticity of my condition. Without the Third, no
matter what might be the adversity of the world, I should
apprehend myself as a triumphant transcendence; with the
appearance of the Third, “I” experience “Us” as apprehended
in terms of things and as things overcome by the world.
Thus the oppressed class finds its class unity in the knowl-
edge which the oppressing class has of it, and the appearance
among the oppressed of class consciousness corresponds to the
assumption in shame of an Us-object. We shall see in the'
following section what “class consciousness” can be for a
member of the oppressing class. What is important for us
here- in any case and what is sufficiently illustrated by the
example which we have just chosen is that the experience of
the Us-object presupposes that of the being-for-others, of
which it is only a more complex modality. Therefore by vir-
tue of being a particular case it falls within the compass of
our preceding descriptions. Moreover it encloses within itself
a power of disintegration since it is experienced through
s ame and since the “Us” collapses as soon as the for-itself
reclaims its selfness in the face of the Third and looks at him
individual claim of selfness is moreover only one
finn suppressing the Us-object. The assump-
eyam 1 ® Us in Certain strongly structured cases, as, for
class consciousness, no longer implies the project of
g oneself from the “Us” by an individual recovery of
546
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
selfness but rather the project of freeing the whole “Us”
from the object-state by transforming it into a We-subject.
At bottom we are dealing with a variation of the project
already described of transforming the one who is lookmg into
the one who is looked-at; it is the usual passage from one to
the other of the two great fundamental attitudes of the for-
others. The oppressed class can, in fact, affirm itself as a We-
subject only in relation to the oppressing class and at the
latter’s expense; that is, by transforming it in turn into “they-
as-objects” or “Them.” The person who is engaged objec-
tively in the class aims at involving the whole class in and
by means of his project of reversal. In this sense the expe-
rience of the Us-object refers to that of the We-subject' just as
the experience of my being-an-object-for-others refers me to
the experience of being-an-object-for-others-for-me. Similarly
we shall find in what is called “mob psychology” collective
crazes {Boulangism, etc.) which are a particular form of love.
The person who says “Us” then reassumes in the heart of the
crowd the original project of love, but it is no Jonger on his
own account; he asks a Third to save the whole collectivity in
its very object-state so that he may sacrifice his freedom to it
Here as above disappointed love leads to masochism. This is ’
seen in the case in which the collectivity rushes into servitude
and asks to be treated as an object. The problem involves
here again multiple individual projects of men in the crowd;
the crowd has been constituted as a crowd by the look of the
leader or the speaker; its unity is an object-unity which each
one of its members reads in the look of the Third who dom-
inates it, and each one then forms the project of losing him-
self in this object-ness, of wholly abandoning his selfness in
order to be no longer anything but an instrument in the hands
of the leader. But this instrument in which he wants to be
dissolved is no longer his pure and simple personal br-
others; it is the totality, objective-crowd. The monstrous
materiality of the crowd and its profound reality (although
only experienced) are fascinating for each of its members;
each one demands to be submerged in the crowd-instrument
by the look of the leader.^®
In these various instances we have seen that the Us-object
is always constituted in terms of a concrete situation in which
one part of the detotalized-totality “humanity” is immersed to
Cf. the numerous cases of a refusal of selfness. The for-itself refuses
to emerge m anguish outside the “Us"
547
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
the exclusion -of another part. We are “Us” only in the eyes
of Others, and it is in terms of the Others’ look that we
assume ourselves as “Us.” But this implies that there can
exist an abstract, unrealizable project of the for-itself toward
an absolute totalization of itself and of all Others. This effort
at recovering the human totality can not take place without
positing the existence of a Third, who is on principle distinct
from humanity and in whose eyes humanity is wholly object.
This unrealizable Third is simply the object of the limiting-
concept of otherness. He is the one who is Third in relation
to all possible groups, the one who in no case can enter into
community with any human group, the Thkd in relation to
whom no other can constitute himself as a third. This con-
cept is the same as that of the being-who-looks-at and who
can never be looked-at; that is, it is one with the idea of God.
But if God is characterized as radical absence, the effort to
realize humanity as ours is forever renewed and forever re-
sults in failure. Thus the humanistic “Us” — the Us-object — ^is
proposed to each individual consciousness as. an ideal impossi-
ble to attain although everyone keeps the illusion„of being
able to succeed in it by progressively enlarging the circle of
communities to which he does belong. This humanistic “Us”
remains ' an empty concept, a pure indication of a possible
extension of the ordinary usage of the “Us.” Each time that
we use the “Us” in this sense (to designate suffering humanity,
sinful humanity, to determine an objective historical meaning
by considering man as an object which is developing its
potentialities) we limit ourselves to indicating -a certain
concrete experience to be undergone in the presence of the
absolute Third; that- is, of God. Thus the limiting-concept
of humanity (as the totality of the Us-object) and the
limiting-concept of God imply one another and are cor-
relative.
B. The We-Subject
T is the world which makes known to us our belonging to a
^bject-community, especially the existence in the world of
Tno^ objects. These objects have been worked on by
^ that is, for a non-individualized and
j transcendence which coincides with the un-
ntiated look which we called earlier the “They.” The
548 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
worker — servile or not — ^works in the presence of an undiffer-
entiated and absent transcendence and can only outline the
free possibilities of this transcendence in the vacuum — so to
speak — upon the object on which he is working. In this
sense the worker, whoever he may be, experiences in work his
being-an-instrument for others. Work, when it is not strictly
destined for the ends of the worker himself, is a mode of
alienation. The alienating transcendence is here the consumer;
that is, the “They” whose projects the worker is limited to
anticipating. As soon as I use a manufactured object, I meet
upon it the outline of my own transcendence; it indicates to
me the movement to be made; I am to turn, push, draw, or
lean. Moreover we are dealing here with an hypothetical im-
perative; it refers me to an end which is equally in the world:
if I want to sit down, if I want to open the box, etc. And this
end itself has been anticipated in the constitution of the ob-
ject as an end posited by some transcendence. It belongs at
present to the object as its most peculiar potentiality. Thus
it is true that the manufactured object makes me known to
myself as “they”; that is, it refers to me the image of my
transcendence as that of any transcendence whatsoever. And
if I allow my possibilities to be channeled by the instrument
thus constituted, I experience myself as any transcendence:
to go from the subway station at “Trocadero” to “Sevres-
Babylon,” “They” change at “La Motte-Picquet.” This change
is foreseen, indicated on maps, etc.; if I change routes at
La Motte-Picquet, I am the “They” who change. To be
sure, I differentiate myself by each use of the subway as
much by the individual upsurge of my being as by the dis-
tant ends which I pursue. But these final ends are only on the
horizon of my act. My immediate ends are the ends of the
‘They,” and I apprehend myself as interchangeable with any
one of my neighbors. In this sense we lose our real individu-
ality, for the project which we are is precisely the project
which others are. In this subway corridor there is only one
and the s^e project, inscribed a long time ago in matter,
where a living and undifferentiated transcendence comes to
be absorbed. To the extent that I realize myself in solitude as
any transcendence, I have only the experience of undiffer-
entiated-being {e.g., if alone in my room I open a jar of
preserves with the proper opener) . But if this indiffer-
entiated transcendence projects its projects, whatever they
are, in connection with other transcendences experienced as
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
549
rpnl nreseaces similarly absorbed *jn projects identical wij
mv oroiects then I realize ray project as one among thous^ds'
7Scd projects projected by one and the same undiffer-
enUated tranLndence. Hian I have the expenence ^ ^ com-
mon transcendence directed toward a unique end of wto I
Zn only an ephemeral particularization; 1 insert myself into
the great human stream which from the time that the subway,
first existed has flowed incessantly into the corridors of the
station “La Motte-Picquet-Grenelle.” But we must note the.
following: j j V
(1) This experience is of the psychological order and not
ontological. It in no way corresponds to a real imification of
the for-itselfs under consideration. Neither does it stem from
an immediate experience of their transcendence as such (as in
being-looked-at), but it is motivated rather by the double
objectivizing apprehension of the object transcended in com--
mon and of the bodies which surround mine. In particular the ,
fact that I am engaged with others in a common rhythm which
I contribute to creating is especially likely to lead me to appre-
hend myself as engaged in a We-subject This is the meaning
of the cadenced march of soldiers; it is the meaning also of
the rhythmic work of a crew. It must be noted, however,
that in this case the rhythm emanates freely from me; it is a
project which I realize by means of my transcendence; it
synthesizes a future with a present and a past within a per-
spective of regular repetition; it is I who produce this rhythm.
But at the same time it melts into the general rhythm of the
work or of the march of the concrete community which sur-
roun^ me. It gets its meaning only through this general
^ experience, for example, when the
rnythm which 1 adopt is contretemps. Yet the enveloping
of my rh^ by the rhythm of the Other is apprehended
laterally. H do not utilize the collective rhythm as an in-
contemplate it— in the sense in which,
lor example, I might contemplate dancers on a stae'e It
?o7o nT “c Without being an
my 7nsSe'n7 -“.‘T"* PossibUities: but I slip
—to accomnlish n ^ transcendence, and my own end
Place!!is77nd
the peculiar end nf tiiA distinct from
I came to be bom is b„Fn
% as the coUecfoe rhv*7 wi* me and later-
ve rhythm, it is my rhythm to the extent
550
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
that it is their rhythm and conversely. There precisely is the
motive for the experience of the We-subject; it is JSnally our
rhythm.
Yet we can see that this can be only if by the earlier accep-
tance of a common end and of common instruments I con-
stitute myself as an undifferentiated transcendence by rejecting
my personal ends beyond the collective ends at present pur-
sued. Thus whereas in the experience of being-for-others the
upsurge of a dimension of real and concrete being is the con-
dition for the very experience, the experience of the We-
subject is a pure psychological, subjective event in a single
consciousness; it corresponds to an inner modification of the
structure of this consciousness but does not appear on the
foundation of a concrete ontological relation with others and
does not realize any Mitsein. It is a question only of a way
of feeling myself in the midst of others. Of pourse this ex-
perience can be looked on as the symbol of an absolute, meta-
physical unity of all transcendences; it seems, in fact, that
it overcomes the original conflict of transcendences by making
them converge in the direction of the world. In this sense
the ideal We-subject would be the “we” of a humanity which
would make itself master of the earth. But the experience of
the “we” remains on the ground of individual psychology
and remains a simple symbol of the longed-for unity of tran-
scendences. It is, in fact, in no way a lateral, real apprehen-
sion of subjectivities as such by a single subjectivity; the sub-
jectivities remain out of reach and radically separated. But it
is things and bodies, it is the material channeling of my
transcendence which disposes me to apprehend it as extended
and supported by the other transcendences without my getting
out of myself and without the others getting out of them-
selves. I apprehend through the world that I form a part of
“we.”
This is why my experience of the We-subject in no way
implies a similar and correlative experience in others; this is
why also it is so unstable, for it depends on particular organi-
zations in the midst of the world and it disappears with those
organizations. In truth, there is in the world a host of for-
matiom which indicate me an anybody: first of all, all instru-
mental formations from tools proper to buildings with their
elevators, their water or gas pipes, their electricity, not to
means of transportation, shops, etc. Every shop win-
dow, each plate of glass refers to me my image as an undiffer-
551
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
entiated transcendence. In addition professional and technical
relations with others make me known to myself as anybody:
for the waiter I am any patron, for the ticket collector I am
any user of the subway. Finally the chance incident which sud-
denly takes place in front of the pavement of The cafe where I
am sitting indicates me as an anonymous spectator and as a
pure “look which makes this incident exist — as an outside.
Similarly it is the anonymity of the spectator which is indicated
by the theatrical performance which I am attending or the ex-
hibition of pictures which I visit. And of course I make
myself anybody when I try on shoes or uncork a bottle or go
into an elevator or laugh in the theater. But the experience of
this undifferentiated transcendence is an iimer and contin-
gent event which concerns only me. Certain particular circum-
stances which come from the world can add to my impression
of being part of the “we.” But in every instance we are deal-
ing with only a purely subjective impression which engages
only me.
(2) The experience of the We-subject can not be primary;
it can not constitute an original attitude toward others since,
on the contrary, it must in order to be realized presuppose a
twofold preliminary recognition of the existence of others. In
the first place, the manufactured object is such only if it refers
to the producers who have made it and to rules for its use
which have been fixed by others. Confronting an inanirnate
thing which has not been worked on, for which I myself fix
its mode of use and to which I myself assign a new use (if,
for example, I use a stone as a hammer) , I have a non-thetic
consciousness of myself as a person; that is, of my selfness,
of my own ends, and of my free inventiveness. The rules for
J^ing, the “methods of employing” manufactured objects are
both rigid and ideal like taboos and by their essential struc-
ture put me in the presence of the Other; it is because the
Other neats me as an undifferentiated transcendence that I
can realize myself as such.
, ^ ready exarnple, take those big signs which are above
UiA ^ station or in a waiting room and which bear
on “Enhance”; or again the directing hands
wp nrp which indicate a building or a direction. Here
hPm 1 hypothetical imperatives. But
Ofhpr of the imperative clearly allows the
dre<;Qino V the Other who is speaking and ad-.,
g unself directly to me. It is indeed to me that the
552
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
printed sentence is directed; it represents in fact an immediate
communication from the Other to me: I am aimed at. But
if the Other aims at me, it is in so far as I am an undifferen-
tiated transcendence. As soon as I avail myself of the opening
marked “Exit” and go out through it, I am not using it in the
absolute freedom of my personal projects. I am not constitut-
ing a tool by means of invention; I do not surpass the pure
materiality of the thing toward my possibles. But between the
object and me there has already slipped in a human transcen-
dence which guides my transcendence. The object is already
humanized; it signifies “human control.” The “Exit” — con-
sidered as a pure opening out onto the street — is strictly equiv-
alent to the “Entrance”; neither its coefficient of adversity nor
its visible utility designates it as an exit. I do not submit
to the object itself when I use it as an “Exit”; I adapt my-
self to the human order. By my very act I recognize the
Other’s existence; I set up a dialogue with the Other.
All this Heidegger has said and very well. But the con-
clusion which he neglects to derive from it is that in order
for the object to appear as manufactured, it is necessary that
the Other be first given in some other way. A person who had
not already experienced the Other would in no way be able
to distinguish the manufactured object from the pure materi-
ality of a thing which has not been worked on. Even if he
were to utilize it according to the method foreseen by the
manufacturer, he would be reinventing this method and would
thus realize a free appropriation of a natural thing. To go out
by the passage marked “Exit” without having read the writing
or without knowing the language is to be like the Stoic mad-
man who in broad daylight says, “It is day,” not as the con-
sequence of an objective establishment but by virtue of inner
resources of his madness. If therefore the manufactured object
refers to Others and therebjr to my undifferentiated transcen-
dence, this is because I already know Others. Thus the experi-
ence of the We-subject is based on the original experience
of the Other and can be only a secondary and subordinate ex-
perience.
Furthermore, as we have seen, to apprehend oneself as an
undifferentiated transcendence — that is, at bottom as a pure
exemplification of the “human species” — is not yet to appre-
hend oneself as the partial structure of a We-subjecL For
that, in fact, one must discover oneself as anybody in the
center of some human stream. Therefore it is necessary to be
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS 553,
surrounded by others. We have seen also ihat the others ^e
in no way experienced as subjects in this experience, but
neither are they apprehended as objects.^ They are not posited
at all. Of course, I proceed on the basis of their factual ex-
istence in the world and of the perception of their acts. But
I do not apprehend their facticity or their movements posi-
tionally; I have a lateral and non-positional consciousness of
their bodies as correlative with my body, of their acts as un-
folding in connection with my acts in such a way that I can
not determine whether it is my acts which give birth to their
acts or their acts which give birth to mine. A few observations
will suffice to make clear that the experience of the “We” can
not enable me originally to know as Others the Others who
make part of the We. Quite the contrary, it is necessary that
&st there should be some awareness of what the Other is in
order for an experience of my relations with Others to be
realized in the form of the Mitsein. The Mitsein by itself
would be impossible without a preliminary recognition of what
the Other is: “I am with .” Very well. But with
whom? In addition even if this experience were ontologically
primary, one can not see how one could pass into a radicd
modification of this experience — going from a totally undif-
ferentiated transcendence to the experience of particular per-
sons. If the Other were not given elsewhere, the experience
of the “We” when broken up would give birth only to the
apprehension of pure object-instruments in the world circum-
scribed by my transcendence.
These few remarks do not claim to exhaust the question
of the “We.” They aim only at indicating that the experience
of the We-subject has no value as a metaphysical revelation; it
depends strictly on the various forms of the for-others and is
only an empirical enrichment of certain of these forms. It is
to this fact evidently that we should attribute the extreme
instability of this experience. It comes and disappears capri-
ciously, leaving us in the face of others-as-objects or else of
a They” who look at us. It appears as a provisional appease-
ment which is constituted at the very heart of the conflict,
not as a definitive solution of this conflict. We should hope
in vain for a human “we” in which the intersubjective totality
would obtain consciousness of itself as a unified subjectivity.
Such an ideal could be only a dream produced by a passage to
tne limit and to the absolute on the basis of fragmentary,
strictly psychological experiences. Furthermore this ideal itself
554 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
implies the recognition of the conflict of transcendences as
the original state of being-for-others.
This fact explains an apparent paradox: since the unity of
the oppressed class stems from the fact that it is experienced
as an Us-object in the face of an undifferentiated “They”
which is the Third or the oppressing class, one might be
tempted to believe that by a sort of symmetry the oppressing
class apprehends itself as a We-subject in the face of the
oppressed class. But the weakness of the oppressmg class lies
in the fact that although it has at its disposal precise and
rigorous means for coercion, it is within itself profoundly
anarchistic. The “bourgeois” is not only defined as a certain
homo osconomicus disposing of a precise power and privilege
in the heart of a society of a certain type; he is described in-
wardly as a consciousness which does not recognize its be-
longing to a class. His situation, m fact, does not allow him
to apprehend himself as engaged in an Us-object in commu-
nity with the other members of the bourgeois class. But on the
other hand, the very nature of the We-subject implies that it
is made up of only fleeting experiences without metaphysical
bearing. The “bourgeois” commonly denies that there are
classes; he attributes the existence of a proletariat to the ac-
tion of agitators, to awkward incidents, to injustices which
can be repaired by particular measures; he afems the ex-
istence of a solidarity of interests between capital and labor;
he offers instead of class solidarity a larger solidarity, natural
solidarity, in which the worker and the employer are integrat-
ed in a Mitsein which suppresses the conflict. The question
here is not, as so often said, one of maneuvers or of a stupid
refusal to see the situation in its true light; rather the member
of the oppressing class sees the totality of the oppressed class
confronting him as an objective ensemble of “they-subjects”
without his correlatively realizing his community of being
with the other members of the' oppressing class. Tke two ex-
periences are in no way complementary; in fact one may be
alone in the face of an oppressed collectivity and still be able
to grasp it as an object-instrument and apprehend oneself as
&e internal-negation of this collectivity; i.e., simply as the
impartial Third. It is only when the oppressed class by rev-
olution or by a sudden increase of its power posits itself as
they-who-look-at” in the face of members of the oppressing
class, it is onlv then that the oppressors experience themselves
CONCRETE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS 555
as “Us.” But this will be in fear and shame and as an Us-
object.
Thus there is no symmetry between the making proof of
the Us-object and the experience of the We-subject. The first
is the revelation of a dimension of real existence and corre-
sponds to a simple enrichment of the original proof of the for-
others- The second is a psychological experience realized by an
historic man immersed in a working universe and in a society
of a definite economic type. It reveals nothing particular; it is
a purely subjective Erlebnis.
It appears therefore that the experience of the “We”
and the “Us,” although real, is not of a nature to modify the
results of our prior investigations. As for the Us-object, this
is directly dependent on the Third — i.e., on my being-for-
others — and it is constituted on the foundation of my being-
outside-for-others. And as for the We-subject, this is a psy-
chological experience which supposes one way or another that
the Other’s existence as such has been already revealed to us.
It is therefore useless for human-reality to seek to get out of
this dilemma: one must either transcend the Other or allow
oneself to be transcended by him. The essence of the relations
between consciousnesses is not the Mitsein; it is conflict.
At the end of this long description of the relations of the
for-itself with others we have then achieved this certainty:
the for-itself is not only a being which arises as the nihilation
of the in-itself which it is and the internal negation of the
in-itself which it is not. This nihilating flight is entirely re-
appfehended by the in-itself and fixed in in-itself as soon as
the Other appears. The for-itself when alone transcends the
world; it is the nothing by which there are things. The Other
by rising up confers on the for-itself a being-in-itself-in-the-
mdst-of-the-world as a thing among things. This petrifaction
in in-itself by the Other’s look is the profound meaning of the
myth of Medusa.
We have therefore advanced in our pursuit: we wanted to
determine the original relation of the for-itself to the in-itself.
We learned first that the for-itself was the nihilation and the
radical negation of the in-itself; at present we establish that it
IS also by the sole fact of meeting with the Other and with-
— totally in-itself, present in the midst
0 the m-itself. But this second aspect of the for-itself repre-
sents Its outside; the for-itself by nature is the being which
can not coincide with its being-in-itself.
556
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
These remarks can serve as the basis for a general theory
of being, which is the goal toward which we are working.
Nevertheless it is stUl too soon for us to attempt this theory.
Actually it is not sufficient to describe the for-itself as simply
projecting its possibilities beyond being-in-itself. This pro-
jecting ofTts possibilities does not statically determine the con-
f guration of the world; it changes the world at every instant.
If we read Heidegger, for example, we are struck, from this
point of view, with the inadequacy of his hermeneutic de-
scriptions. Adopting his terminology, we shall say that he has
described the Dasein as the existent which surpasses existents
toward their being. And being, here, signifies the meaning or
the mode of being of the existent. It is true that the for-itself
is the being by which existents reveal their mode of being.
But Heidegger passes over in silence the fact that the for-
itself is not only the being which constitutes an ontology
of existents but ffiat it is also the being by whom ontic modi-
fications supervene for the existent qua existent. This perpet-
ual possibility of acting — that is, of modifying the in-itself in
its ontic materiality, in its “flesh” — ^must evidently be con-
sidered as an essential characteristic of the for-itself. As such
this possibility must find its foundation in an original relation
of the for-itself to the in-itself, a relation which we have not
yet brought to light. What does it mean to act? Why does
the for-itself act? How can it act? Such are the questions to
which we must reply at present. We have all the elements for
a reply: nihilation, facticity and the body, being-for-others,
the peculiar nature of the in-itself. We must question them
once more.
PART FOUR
Having, Doing, and Being
“Havikg,” “doing,” and “being”i are the cardinal categories
of human reality. Under them are subsumed all types of
human conduct. Knowing, for example, is a modality of
having. These categories are not without connection with one -
another, and several writers have emphasized these ties.
Denis de Rougemont is throwing light on this kind of rela-
tion when he writes in his article on Don Juan, “He was not
capable of having.” Again a similar connection is indicated
when a moral agent is represented as doing in order to “do .
himself” and “doing himself” in order to be.
However since the reaction against the doctrine of sub-
stance has won out in modern philosophy, the majority of
thinkers have attempted to do on the ground of human con-
duct what their predecessors have done in physics — ^to re-
place substance by simple motion. For a long time the aim of
ethics was to provide man with a way of being. This was
the meaning of Stoic morality or of Spinoza’s Ethics. But
if the being of man is to be reabsorbed in the succession
of his acts, then the purpose of ethics will no longer be to
raise man to a higher ontological dignity. In this sense the
faire, etre. It is difficult to know how to translate faire since
artre gives to it all of the twofold significance of doing and making
w ch the word carries in French. On the whole “doing’* seems closer,
especially since such expressions as “to do a book” or “to do a play”
carry the same double meaning and make sense in English even though
Uiey are admittedly awkward.
557
558
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Kantian morality is the first great ethical system which sub-
stitutes doing for being as the supreme value of action. The
heroes of UEspoir are for the most part on the level of
doing, and Malraux shows us the conflict between the old
Spanish democrats who still try to be and the Communists
whose morality results in a series of precise, detailed obliga-
tions, each of these obligations aiming at a particular doing.
Who is right? Is the supreme value of human activity a
doing or a being? And whichever solution we adopt, what
is to become of having? Ontology should be able to inform us
concerning this problem; moreover it is one of ontology’s
essential tasks if the for-itself is the being which is defined by
action. Therefore we must not bring this work to a close with-
out giving a broad outline for the study of action in general
and of the essential relations of doing, of being, and of
having.
CHAPTER ONE
Being and Doing: Freedom
I. FREEDOM: THE FIRST CONDITION
OF ACTION
It is strange that philosophers have been able to argtie end-
lessly about determinism and free will, to cite examples in
favor of one or the other thesis without ever attempting first
to make explicit the structures contained in the very idea of
action. The concept of an act contains, in fact, numerous,^
subordinate notions which we shall have to organize and ar-
range in a hierarchy: to act is to modify the shape of the
world; it is to arrange means in view of an end; it is to pro-
duce an organized instrumental complex such that by a series
of concatenations and connections the m.odification effected
on one of the links causes modifications throughout the*
whole series and finally produces an anticipated result. But
this is not what is important for us here. We should observe
first that an action is on principle intentional. The careless
smoker who has through negligence caused the explosion of a
powder magazine has not acted. On the other hand the
worker who is charged with dynamiting a quarry and who
obeys the given orders has acted when he has produced the
expected explosion; he knew what he was doing or, if you
intentionally realized a conscious project.
mean, of course, that one must foresee all
consequences of his act. The emperor Constantine, when
559
560
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
he established himself at Byzantium, did not foresee that he
would create a center of Greek culture and language, the
appearance of which would ultimately provoke a schism in
the Christian Church and which would contribute to weaken-
ing the Roman Empire. Yet he performed an act just in so
far as he realized his project of creating a new residence for
emperors in the Orient. Equating the result with the intention
is here sufficient for us to be able to speak of action. But if
this is the case, we establish that the action necessarily im-
plies as its condition the recognition of a “desideratuna”; that
is, of an objective lack or again of a negatite. The intention
of providing a rival for Rome can come to Constantine only
through the apprehension of an objective lack; Rome lacks a
counterweight; to this still profoundly pagan city ought to be
opposed a Christian city which at the moment is missing.
Creating Constantinople is understood as an act only if first
the conception of a new city has preceded the action itself or
at least if this conception serves as an organizing theme for
all later steps. But this conception can not be the pure repre-
sentation of the city as possible. It apprehends the city in its
essential characteristic, which is to be a desirable and not yet
realized possible.
This means that from the moment of the first conception
of the act, consciousness has been able to withdraw itself from
the full world of which it is consciousness and to leave the
level of being in order frankly to approach that of non-being.
Consciousness, in so far as it is considered exclusively in its
being, is perpetually referred from being to being and can not
find in being any motive for revealing non-being. The im-
perial system with Rome as its capital functions positively and
in a certain real way which can be easily discovered. Will
someone say that the taxes are collected badly, that Rome- is-
not secure from invasions, that it does not have the geographi-
cal location which is suitable for the capital of a Mediterra-
nean empire which is threatened by barbarians, that its corrupt
morals makt the spread of the Christian religion difficult?
How can anyone fail to see that all these considerations are
negative; that is, that they aim at what is not, not at what is.
To say that sixty per cent of the anticipated taxes have been
collected can pass, if need be, for a positive appreciation
of the situation such as it is. To say that they are badly col-
lected is to consider the situation across a situation which is
posited as an absolute end but which precisely is not. To say
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 561
that the corrupt morals at Rome hinder the spread_ of Chris-
Uanity is not to consider this diffusion for what it is; that is,
for a propagation at a rate which the reports of the clergy can
enable us to determine. It is to posit the diffusion m itself
as insufficient; that is, as suffering from a secret nothingness.
But it appears as such only if it is surpassed toward a limiting-
situation posited a priori as a value (for example, to-
ward a certain rate of religious conversions, toward a certam
mass morality). This limiting-situation can not be conceived
in, terms of the simple consideration of the real state of
things; for the most beautiful girl in the world can offer only
what she has, and in the same way the most' miserable situa-
tion can by itself be designated only as it is without any refer-
ence to an ideal nothingness.
In so far as man is immersed in the historical situation, he
does not even succeed in conceiving of the failures and lacks
in a political organization or determined economy; this is not,
as is stupidly said, because he “is ' accustomed to it,” but be-
cause he apprehends it in its plenitude of being and because
he can not even imagine that he can exist in it otherwise. For
it is necessary here to reverse common opinion and on the
basis of what it is not, to acknowledge the harshness of a
situation or the suffering which it imposes, both of which
are motives for conceiving of another state of affairs in which
things would be better for everybody. It is on the day that we
can conceive of a different state of affairs that a new light
falls on our troubles and our suffering and that we decide
that these are unbearable. A worker in 1830 is capable of re-
volting if his salary is lowered, for he easily conceives of a
situation in which his wretched standard of living would be
not as low as the one which is about to be imposed on him.
k/ represent his sufferings to himself as unbear-
able; he adapts himself to them not through resignation but
ecause he lacks the education and reflection necessary for
mm to conceive of a social state, in which these sufferings
would not exist. Consequently he does not act. Masters of
yon following a riot, the workers at Croix-Rousse do not
wilderjri^^^ ^ ^ victory; they return home be-
coming ffie regular army has no trouble in over-
"habitir w misfortunes do not appear to them
constitute
are not se^ detached; they
in the clear hght of day, and consequently they
562
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
are integrated by the worker with his being. He suffers with-
out considering his suffering and without conferring value
upon it. To suffer and to be are one and the same for him.
His suffering is the pure affective tenor of his non-positional
consciousness, but he does not contemplate it. Therefore this
suffering can not be in itself a motive- for his acts. Quite the
contrary, it is after he has formed the project of changing
the situation that it will appear intolerable to him. This means
that he will have had to give himself room, to withdraw in
relation to it, and will have to have effected a double nihila-
tion: on the one hand, he must posit an ideal state of affairs as
a pure present nothingness; on the other hand, he must posit
the actual situation as nothingness in relation to this state of
affairs. He will have to conceive of a happiness attached to
his class as a pure possible — that is, presently as a certain
nothingness — and on the other hand, he will return to the
present situation in order to illuminate it in the light of this
nothingness and in order to nihilate it in turn by declaring:
“I am not happy.”
Two important consequences result. (1) No factual state
whatever it may be (the political and economic structure of
society, the psychological “state,” etc.) is capable by itself of
motivating any act whatsoever. For an act is a projection of
the for-itself toward what is not, and what is can in no way
determine by itself what is not. (2) No factual state can deter-
mine consciousness to apprehend it as a negatite or as a lack.
Better yet no factual state can determine consciousness to de-
fine it and to circumscribe it since, as we have seen, Spinoza’s
statement, “Omnis deterrainatio est negatio,” remains pro-
foundly true. Now every action has for its express condition
not only the discovery of a state of affairs as “lacking in
■ ,” Le., as a negatite — but also, and before all else, the
constitution of the state of things under consideration into
an isolated system. There is a factual state — ^satisfying or not
— only by means of the nihilating power of the for-itself.
But this power of nihilation can not be limited to realizing a
“Tr. In this and following sections Sartre makes a sharp distinction
between motif and mobile. The English word “motive” expresses sufficiently
adequately the French mobile, which refers to an mner subjective fact or
attitude. For motif there is no true equivalent. Since it refers to an external
fact or situation, I am translating it by “cause.” The reader must remember,
however, that this carries with it no idea of determinism. Sartre emphatically
demes the existence of any cause in the usual determimstic sense.
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
5^
simple withdrawal in relation to the world. In fact in so far
as consciousness is “invested” by being, in so far as it
simply suffers what is, it must be included in being. It is the
organized form — worker-finding-his-suffering-natural — ^which
must be surmounted and denied in order for it to be able to
form the object of a revealing contemplation. This means
evidently that it is by a pure wrenching away from himself
and the world that the worker can posit his suffering as un-
bearable suffering and consequently can make of it the motive
for his revolutionary action. This implies for consciousness the
permanent possibility of effecting a rupture with its own past,
of wrenching itself away from its past so as to be able to con-
sider it in the light of a non-being and so as to be able to
confer on it the meaning which it has in terms of the project
of a meaning which it does not have. Under no circumstances
can the past in any way by itself produce an act; that is, the
positing of an end which turns back upon itself so as to illumi-
nate it. This is what Hegel caught sight of when he wrote
that “the mind is the negative,” although he seems not to have
remembered this when he came to presenting his own theory
of action and of freedom. In fact as soon as one attributes to
consciousness this negative power with respect to the world
and itself, as soon as the nihilation forms an integral part of
the positing of an end, we must recognize that the indispens-
able and fundamental condition of all action is the freedom
of the acting being.
Thus at the outset we can see what is lacking in those
tedious discussions between determinists and the proponents
of free will. The latter are concerned to find cases of deci-
sion for which there exists no prior cause, or deliberations
concerning two opposed acts which are equally possible and
possess causes (and motives) of exactly the same weight.
To which the determinists may easily reply that there is no
action without a cause and that the most insignificant ges-
ture (raising the right hand rather than the left hand, etc.)
refers to causes and motives which confer its meaning upon
It. Indeed the case could not be otherwise since every action
must be intentional; each action must, in fact, have an^end,
and the end in turn is referred to a cause. Such indeed is
the unity of the three temporal ekstases; the end or temporal-
ization of my future implies a cause (or motive); that is.
It points toward my past, and the present is the upsurge of
the act. _ To speak of an act without a cause is to speak of
564 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
an act which would lack the intentional structure of every
act; and the proponents of free will by searching for it on
the level of the act which is in the process of being performed
can only end up by rendering the act absurd: But the deter- «
minists in tinrn are weighting the scale by stopping their
investigation with the mere designation of the cause and
motive. The essential question in fact lies beyond the com-
plex organization “cause-intention-act-end”; indeed we ought
to ask how a cause (or motive) can be constituted as
such.
Now we have just seen that if there is no act without
a cause, this is not in the sense that we can say that there is
no phenomenon without a cause. In order to be a cause, the
cause must be experienced as such. Of course this. does not
mean that it is to be thematically conceived and made explic-
it as in the case of deliberation. But at the very least it
means that the for-itself must confer on it its value as cause
or motive. And, as we have seen, this constitution of the
cause as such can not refer to another real and positive ex-
istence; that is, to a prior cause. For otherwise the very nature
of the act as engaged intentionally in non-being would
disappear. The motive is understood only by the end; that is,
by the non-existent. It is therefore in itself a negatite. If I
accept a niggardly salary it is doubtless because of fear;
and fear is a motive. But it is fear of dying from starvation;
that is, this fear has meaning only outside itself in an end
ideally posited, which is the preservation of a life which I
.apprehend as “in danger.” And this fear is understood in
turn only in relation to the value which I implicitly give to
this life; that is, it is referred to that hierarchal system of
ideal objects which are values. Thus the motive makes it-
self understood as what it is by means of the ensemble of
beings which “are not,” by ideal existences, and by the fu-
ture. Just as the future turns back upon the present and
the past in order to elucidate them, so it is the ensemble of
my projects which turns back in order to confer upon the
motive its structure as a motive. It is only because I escape
the m-itself by nihilating myself toward my possibilities that
this in-itseif can take on value as cause or motive. Causes and
motives have meaning only inside a projected ensemble
which is precisely an ensemble of non-existents. And this
ensemble is ultimately myself as transcendence; it is Me
in, so fair as I have to be myself outside of' myself.
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 565
If we recall the principle which we established earlier —
namely that it is -the apprehension of a revolution as pos-
sible which gives to the workman’s suffering its value^ as a
motive — we must thereby conclude that it is by fleeing a
situation toward our possibility of changing it that we organ-
ize this situation into complexes of causes and motives. The
nihilation by which we achieve a withdrawal in relation to
the situation is the same as the ekstasis by which we project
ourselves toward a modification of this situation. The result
is that it is in fact impossible to find an act without a motive
but that this does not mean that we must conclude that
the motive causes the act; the motive is an integral part of
the act. For as the resolute project toward a change is not
distinct from the act, the motive, the act, and the end are all
constituted in a single upsurge. Each of these three structures
claims the two others as its meaning. But the organized to-
tality of the three is no longer explained by any particular
structure, and its upsurge as the pure temporalizing nihilation
of the in-itself is one with freedom. It is the act which de-
cides its ends and its motives, and the act is the expression
of freedom.
We can not, however, stop with these superficial consider-
ations; if the fundamental condition of the act is freedom,
we must attempt to describe this freedom more precisely.
But at the start we encounter a great difficulty. Ordinarily;
to describe something is a process of making explicit by aim-
ing at the structures of a particular essence. Now freedom has
no essence. It is not subject to any logical necessity; we must
say of. it what Heidegger said of the Dasein in general:
“In it existence precedes and commands essence.” Freedom
makes itself an act, and we ordinarily attain it across the
act which it organizes with the causes, motives, and ends
which the act implies. But precisely because this act has an
essence, it appears to us as constituted; if we wish to reach
the constitutive power, we must abandon any hope of finding
it an essence. That would in fact demand a new constitutive
power and so on to infinity. How then are we to describe
an existence which perpetually makes itself and which refuses
to be confined in a definition? The very use of the term
“freedom” is dangerous if it is to imply that the word refers
to a concept, as words ordinarily do. Indefinable and un-
namable, is freedom also indescribable?
Earlier when we wanted to describe nothingness and the
566
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
being of the phenomenon, we encountered comparable diffi-
culties. Yet they did not deter us. This is because there
can be descriptions which do not aim at the essence but
at the existent itself in its particularity. To be sure, I could
not describe a freedom which would be common to both the
Other and myself; I could not therefore contemplate an es-
sence of freedom. On the contrary, it is freedom which is the
foundation of all essences since man reveals intra-mundane
essences by surpassing the world toward his own possibilities.
But actually the question is of my freedom. Similarly when I
described consciousness, I could not discuss a nature common
to certain individuals but only my particular consciousness,
which like my freedom is beyond essence, or — as we have
shown with considerable repetition — for which to be is to have
been. I discussed this consciousness so as to touch it in its very
existence as a particular experience — the cogito. Husserl' and
Descartes, as Gaston Berger has shown, demand that the
cogito release to them a truth as essence: with Descartes we
achieve the connection of two simple natures; with Husserl
we grasp the eidetic structure of consciousness.® But if in con-
sciousness its existence must precede its essence, then both
Descartes and Husserl have committed an error. What we can
demand from the cogito is only that it discover for us a
factual necessity. It is also to the cogito that we appeal
in order to determine freedom as the freedom which is ours,
as a pure factual necessity; that is, as a contingent existent
but one which I am not able not to experience. I am indeed an
existent who learns his freedom through his acts, but I am also
an existent whose individual and unique existence temporalizes
itself as freedom. As such 1 am necessarily a consciousness
(of) freedom since nothing exists in consciousness except as
the non-thetic consciousness of existing. Thus my freedom is
perpetually in question in my being; it is not a quality added
on or a property of my nature. It is very exactly the stuff
of my .being; and as in my being, my being is in question, I
must necessarily possess a certain comprehension of freedom.
It is this comprehension which we intend at present to make
explicit.
In our attempt to reach to the heart of freedom we may
be helped by the few observations which we have made on
the subject in the course of this work and which we must
summarize here. In the first chapter we established the fact
® Gaston Berger. Le Cogito chez Husserl et chez Descartes. 1940.
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
567
that if negation comes into the world through human-reality,
the latter must be a being who can realize a nihilating
rupture with the world and with himself; and we established
that the permanent possibility of this rupture is the same
as freedom. But on the other hand, we stated that this per-
manent possibility of nihil ating what I am in the form of
“having-been” implies for man a particular type of existence.
We were able then to determine by means of analyses
like that of bad faith that human reality is its own nothingness.
For the for-itself, to be is to nihilate the in-itself which
it is. Under these conditions freedom can be nothing other
than Ais nihilation. It is through this that the for-itself
escapes its being as its essence; it is through this that the for-
itself is always something other than what can be said of it.
For in the final analysis the For-itself is the one which
escapes this very denomination, the one which is already be-
yond the name which is given to it, beyond the property
which is recognized in it. To say that the for-itself has to be
what it is, to say that it is what it is not while not being
what it is, to say that in it existence precedes and conditions
essence or inversely according to Hegel, that for it “Wesen
ist was gewesen ist” — all this is to say one and the same thing:
to be aware that man is free. Indeed by the sole fact that I
am conscious of the causes which inspire my action, these
causes are already transcendent objects for my consciousness;
they are outside. In vain shall I seek to catch hold of them;
I escape them by my very existence. I am condemned to exist
forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives
of my act. I am condemned to be free. This means that no
limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself or,
if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free. To the
extent that the for-itself wishes to hide its own nothingness
from itself and to incorporate the in-itself as its true mode of
being, it is trying also to hide its freedom from itself.
- The ultimate meaning of determinism is to establish with- -
,in us an unbroken continuity of existence in itself. The mo-
tive conceived as a psychic fact — i.e., as a full and given
reality — is, in the deterministic view, articulated without
any break with the decision and the act, both of which are
equally conceived as psychic givens. The in-itself has got hold
of all these “data”; the motive provokes the act as the physical
causes its effect; everything is real, ever3^hing is full. Thus the
refusal of freedom can be conceived only as an attempt to
568
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
apprehend oneself as being-in-itself; it amounts to the same
thin g. Human reality may be defined as a being such
that in its being its freedom is at stake because human reality
perpetually tries to refuse to recognize its freedom. Psycholog-
ically in each one of us this amounts to trying to take the
causes and motives as things. We try to confer permanence
upon them. We attempt to hide from ourselves that their
nature and their weight depend each moment on the mean-
ing which I give to them; we take them for constants. This
amounts to considering the meaning which I gave to them
just now or yesterday — which is irremediable because it
is past — and extrapolating from it a character fixed still in
the present. I attempt to persuade myself that the cause
is as it was. Thus it would pass whole and untouched from
my past consciousness to my present consciousness. It would
inhabit my consciousness. This amounts to trying to give
an essence to the for-itself. In the same way people will
posit ends as transcendences, which is not an error. But in-
stead of seeing that the transcendences there posited are
maintained in their being by my own transcendence, people
will assume that I encounter them upon my surging up in
the world; they come from God, from nature, from “my”
nature, from society. These ends ready made and pre-
human will therefore define the meaning of my act even be-
fore I conceive it, just as causes as pure psychic givens wili
produce it without my even being aware of them.
Cause, act, and end constitute a continuum, a plenum.
These abortive attempts to stifle freedom under the weight
of being (they collapse with the sudden upsurge of anguish
before freedom) show sufficiently that freedom in its founda-
tion coincides with the nothingness which is at the heart
of man. Human-reality is free because it is not enough.
It is free because it is perpetually wrenched away from itself
and because it has been separated by a nothingness from
what it is and from what it will be. It is free, finally, be-
cause its present being is itself a nothingness in the form of
the “reflection-reflecting.” Man is free because he is not him-
self but presence to himself. The being which is what it is
can not be free. Freedom is precisely the nothingness which
is made-to-be at the heart of man and which forces human-
reality to make itself instead of to be. As we have seen, for
human reality, to be is to choose oneself; nothing comes to
It either from the outside or from within which it can re-
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 569
ceive or accept. Without any help whatsoever, it is entirely
abandoned to the intolerable necessity of making itself be —
down to the slightest detail. -Thus freedom is not a being;
it is the being of man— i.e., his nothingness of being.
If we start by conceiving of man as a plenum, it is absurd
to try to find in him afterwards moments or psychic regions
in which he would be free. As well look for emptiness in a
container which one has filled beforehand up to the brirnl
Man can not be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is
wholly and forever free or he is not free at all.
These observations can lead us, if we know how to use
them, to new discoveries. They will enable us first to bring
to light the relations between freedom and what we call the
“will.” There is a fairly common tendency to seek to iden-
tify free acts with voluntary acts and to restrict the determin-
istic explanation to the world of the passions. In short the
point of view of Descartes. The Cartesian will is free, but
there are “passions of the soul.” Again Descartes will attempt
a physiological interpretation of these passions. Later there
will be an attempt to instate a purely psychological determin-
ism. Intellectualistic analyses such as Proust, for example,
attempts with respect to jealousy or snobbery can serve as
illustrations for this concept of the passional “mechanism.”
In this case it would be necessary to conceive of man as
simultaneously free and determined, and the essential prob-
lem would be that of the relations between this uncondi-
tioned freedom and the determined processes of the psychic
life: how will it master the passions, how will it utilize
them for its own benefit? A wisdom which comes from
ancient times — the wisdom of the Stoics — ^will teach us to
come to terms with these passions so as to master them; in
short it will counsel us how to conduct ourselves with regard
to affectivity as man does with respect to nature in general
when he obeys it in order better to control it. Human real-
ity therefore appears as a free power besieged by an ensemble
of determined processes. One will distinguish wholly free
acts, determined processes over which the free will has power,
and processes which on principle escape the human-will.
It^ is clear that we shall not be able to accept such a con-
ception. But let us try better to understand the reasons for
our refusal. There is one objection which is obvious and
which we shall not waste time in developing; this is that such
a trenchant duality is inconceivable at the heart of the psy-
'570
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
chic unity. How in fact could we conceive of a being which
could be one and which nevertheless on the one hand would
be constituted as a series of facts determined by one another —
hence existents in exteriority — and which on the other hand
would be constituted as a spontaneity determining itself to
be and revealing only itself? A priori this spontaneity
would be capable of no action on a determinism already
constituted. On what could it act? On the object itself (the
present psychic fact)? But how could it modify an in-itself
which by definition is and can be only what it is? On the
actual law of the process? This is self-contradictory. On the
antecedents of the process? But it amounts to the same
thing whether we act on the present psychic fact in order
to modify it in itself or act upon it in order to modify its
consequences. And in each case we encounter the same im-
possibility which we pointed out earlier. Moreover, what
instrument would this spontaneity have at its disposal?
If the hand can clasp, it is because it can be clasped. Sponta-
neity, since by definition it is beyond reach, can not in turn
reach; it can produce only itself. And if it could dispose of
a special instrument, it would then be necessary to con-
ceive of this as of an intermediary nature between free will
and determined passions — ^which is not admissible. For dif-
ferent reasons the passions could get no hold upon the will.
Indeed it is impossible for a determined process to act upon
a spontaneity, exactly as it is impossible for objects to act
upon consciousness. Thus any synthesis of two types of exis-
tents is impossible; they are not homogeneous; they will re-
main each one in its incommunicable solitude. The only
bond which a nihilating spontaneity could maintain with
mechanical processes would be the fact that it produces
itself by an internal negation directed toward these existents.
But then the spontaneity will exist precisely only in so far
as it denies concerning itself that it is these passions. Hence-
forth the ensemble of the determined irados will of neces-
sity be apprehended by spontaneity as a pure transcendent;
&at is, as what is necessarily outside, as what is not it.'* This
internal negation would therefore have for its effect only the
dissolution of the Trados in the world, and the irados would
exist as some sort of object in the midst of the world for a
free spontaneity which ^ would be simultaneously will and
consciousness. This discussion shows that two solutions and
*Tr. l.e., is not spontaneity.
BEING AND DOING; FREEDOM 571
only two are possible: either man is wholly determined
(which is inadmissible, especially because a determned con-
sciousness — i.e., a consciousness externally motivated — be-
comes itself pure exteriority and ceases to be consciousness)
or else man is wholly free.
But these observations are still not our primary concern.
They have only a negative bearing. The study of the will
should, on the contrary, enable us to advance further in our
understanding of freedom. And this is why the fact which
strikes us first is that if the will is to be autonomous, then
it is impossible for us to consider it as a given psychic fact;
that is, in-itself. It can not belong to the category defined by
the psychologist as “states of consciousness.” Here as every-
where else we assert that the state of consciousness is a pure
idol of a positive psychology. If the will is to be freedom,
then it is of necessity negativity and the power. of nihilation.
But then we no longer can see why autonomy should be pre-
served for the will. In fact it is hard to conceive, of those
holes of nihilation which would be the volitions and
which would surge up in the otherwise dense and full web
of the passions and of the urdOos in general. If the will
is nihilation, then the ensemble of the psychic must likewise
be nihilation. Moreover — and we shall soon return to this
point — ^where do we get the idea that the “fact” of passion
or that pure, simple desire is not nihilating? Is not passion
first a project and an enterprise? Does it not exactly posit
a state of affairs as intolerable? And is it not thereby forced
to effect a withdrawal in relation to this state of affairs and
to nihilate it by isolating it and by considering it in the
light of an end — i.e., of a non-being? And does not passion
have its own ends which are recognized precisely at the
same moment at which it posits them as non-existent? And
if nihilation is precisely the being of freedom, how can we
refuse autonomy to the passions in order to grant it to the
will?
But this is not all; the will, far from being the unique or
at least the privileged manifestation of freedom, actually —
hke every event of the for-itself — must presuppose the
foundation of an original freedom in order to be able to con-
stitute itself as will. The will in fact is posited as a reflective
decision in relation to certain ends. But it does not create
these ends. It is rather a mode of being in relation to them:
It decrees that the pursuit of these ends will be reflective and
572
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
deliberative. Passion can posit the same ends. For example,
if I am threatened, I can run away at top speed because of
my fear of dying. This passional fact nevertheless posits im-
plicitly as a supreme end the value of life. Another person
in the same situation will, on the contrary, understand that
he must remain at his post even if resistance at first appears
more dangerous than flight; he “will stand firm.” But
his goal, although better understood and explicitly posited,
remains the same as in the case of the emotional reaction.
It is simply that the methods of attaining it are more clearly
conceived; certain of them are rejected as dubious or ineffi-
cacious, others are more solidly organized. The difference
here depends on the choice of means and on the degree of
reflection and of making explicit, not on the end. Yet the
one who flees is said to be “passionate,” and we reserve the
term “voluntary” for the man who resists. Therefore the
question is of a difference of subjective attitude in relation
to a transcendent end. But if we wish to avoid the error which
we denounced earlier and not consider these transcendent
ends as pre-human and as an a priori limit to our transcen-
dence, then we are indeed compelled to recognize that they
are the temporalizing projection of our freedom. Human
reality can not receive its ends, as we^have seen, either from
outside or from a so-called inner “nature.” It chooses them
and by this very choice confers upon them a transcendent
existence as the external limit of its projects. From this
point of view — and if it is understood that the existence of
the Dasein precedes and commands its essence — ^human real-
ity in and through its very upsurge decides to define its own
being by its ends. It is therefore the positing of my ultimate
ends which characterizes my being and which is identical
with the sudden thrust of the freedom which is mine. And
this thrust is an existence; it has nothing to do with an
essence or with a property of a being which would be engen-
dered conjointly with an idea.
Thus since freedom is identical with my existence, it is
the foundation of ends which I shall attempt to attain either
_ths will or by passionate efforts. Therefore it can not be
limited to voluntary acts. Volitions, on the contrary, like
passions are certain subjective attitudes by which we attempt
to attain the ends posited by original freedom. By original
freedom, of course, we should not understand a freedom
which would be prior to the voluntary or passionate act but
573
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
rather a foundation which is strictly contemporary with the
will or the passion and which these manifest, each in its own
way. Neither should we oppose freedom to the will or to
passion as the “profound self’ of Bergson is opposed to the
superficial self; the for-itself is wholly selfness and can hot
have a “profound self,” unless by this we mean certain tran-
scendent structures of the psyche. Freedom is nothing but the
existence of our will or of our passions in so far as this exis-
tence is the nihilation of facticity; that is, the existence of a
being which is its being in the mode of having to be it. We
shall return to this point. In any case let us remember that the
will is determined within the compass of motives and ends
already posited by the for-itself in a transcendent projection
of itself toward its possibles. If this were not so, how could
we understand deliberation, which is an evaluation of means
in relation to already existing ends?
^If these ends are already posited, then what remains to
be decided at each moment is the way in which I shall con-
duct myself with respect to them; in other words, the attitude
which I shall assume. Shall I act by volition or by passion?
Who -can decide except me? In fact, if we admit that cir-
cumstances decide for me (for example, I can act "by volition
when faced with a minor danger but if the peril increases, I
shall fall into passion), we thereby suppress all freedom. It
would indeed be absurd to declare that the will is autonomous
when it appears but that external circumstances strictly deter-
mine the moment of its appearance. But, on the other hand,
how can it be maintained that a will which does not yet exist
can suddenly decide to shatter the chain of the passions and
suddenly stand forth on the fragments of these chains? Such a
conception would lead us to consider the will as a power
which sometimes would manifest itself to consciousness and at
other times would remain hidden, but which would in any
case possess the permanence and the existence “in-itself”
of a property. This is precisely what is inadmissible. It is,
however, certain that common opinion conceives of the
moral life as a struggle between a will-thing and passion-sub-
stances. There is here a sort of psychological Manichaeism
which is absolutely insupportable.
Acmalj.y it is not enough to will; it is necessary to will to
will. Take, for example, a given situation I can react to it'
emotionally. We have shown elsewhere that emotion is not a
574 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
physiological tempest;® it is a reply adapted to the situation;
it is a type of conduct, the meaning and form of which are
the object of an intention of consciousness which aims at
attaining a particular end by particular means. In fear, fainting
and cataplexie® aim at suppressing the danger by suppressing
the consciousness of the danger. There is an intention of
losing consciousness in order to do away with the formidable
world in which consciousness is engaged and which comes
into being through consciousness. Therefore we have to do
with magical behavior provoking the symbolic satisfactions .of
our desires and revealing by the same stroke a magical stratum
of the world. In contrast to this conduct voluntary and ra-
tional conduct will consider the situation scientifically, will
reject the magical, and will apply itself to realizing deter-
mined series and instrumental complexes which will enable us
to resolve the problems. It will organize a system of means by
taking its stand on instrumental determinism. Suddenly it will
reveal a technical world; that is, a world in which each in-
strumental-complex refers to another larger complex and so
on. But what will make me decide to choose the magical
aspect or the technical aspect of the world? It can not be the
world itself, for this in order to be manifested waits to be
discovered. Therefore it is necessary that the for-itself in its
project must choose being the one by whom the world is re-
vealed as magical or rational; that is, the for-itself must as a
free project of itself give to itself magical or rational exis-
tence. It is responsible for either one, for the for-itself can
be only if it has chosen itself. Therefore the for-itself appeara
as the free foundation of its emotions as of its volitions. My
fear is free and manifests my freedom; I have put all my
freedom into my fear, and I have chosen myself as fearful in
this or that circumstance. Under other circumstances I shall
exist as deliberate and courageous, and I shall have put all
my freedom into my courage. In relation to freedom there is
no privileged psychic phenomenon. All my “modes of being”
manifest freedom equally since they are all ways of being my
own nothingness.
This will be even more apparent in the - description
of what we called the “causes and motives” of action. We
^Esqulsse d’une" thSorie des Emotions. Herm ann , 1939 .
® Tr. A word invented by Preyer to refer to a sudden inhibiting numbness
produced by any shock.
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
575
have outlined that description in the preceding pages; at
present it will be well to return to it and take it up again in
more precise terms. Did we not say indeed that passion is the
motive of the act — or again that the passional act is that which
has passion for its motive? And does not the will appear as
the decision which follows deliberation concerning causes
and motives? What then is a cause? What is a motive?
Generally by cause we mean the reason for the act; that
is, the ensemble of rational considerations which justify it.
If the government decides on a conversion of Government
bonds, it will give the .causes for its act: the lessening of the
national debt, the rehabilitation of the Treasury. Similarly it is
by causes that historians are accustomed to explain the acts- of
ministers or monarchs; they will seek the causes for a declara-
tion of war: the occasion is propitious, the attacked country is
disorganized because of internal troubles; it is time to put an
end to an economic conflict which is in danger of lasting
interminably. If Clovis is converted to Catholicism, then inas-
much as so many barbarian kings are Arians, it is because
Clovis sees an opportunity of getting into the good graces of
the episcopate which is all powerful in Gaul. And so on.
One will note here that the cause is characterized as an ob-
jective appreciation of the situation. The cause of Clovis’
conversion is the political and religious state of Gaul; it is the
relative strengths of the episcopate, the great landowners, and
the common people. What motivates the conversion of the
bonds is the state of the national debt. Nevertheless this ob-
jective appreciation can be made only in the light of a pre-
supposed end and within the limits of a project of the for-
itself toward this end. In order for the power of the episcopate
to be revealed to Clovis as the cause of his conversion (that
IS, in order for him to be able to envisage the objective conse-
quences which this conversion could have) it is necessary first
for him to posit as an end the conquest of Gaul. K we
suppose that Clovis, has other ends, he can find in the situation
of the Church causes for his becoming Arian or remaining
pagan. It is even possible that in the consideration of the
Church he can even find no cause for acting in any way at
^1; he will then discover nothing in relation to this subject;
he will leave the situation of the episcopate .in the state of
unrevealed,” in a total obscurity. We shall therefore use the
term cause for the objective apprehension of a determined sit-
576
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
uation as this situation is revealed in the light of a certain end
as being able to serve as the means for attaining this end.
The motive, on the contrary, is generally considered as a
subjective fact. It is the ensemble of the desires, emotions, and
passions which urge me to accomplish a certain act. The his-
torian looks for motives and takes them into account only as a
last resort when the causes are not sufldcient to explain the
act under consideration, Ferdinand Lot, for example, after
having shown that the reasons which are ordinarily given for
the conversion of Constantine are insufficient or erroneous,
writes; “Since it is established that Constantine had eveiy-
thing to lose and apparently nothing to gain by embracing
Christianity, there is only one conclusion possible — that he
yielded to a sudden impulse, pathological or divine as you
prefer.”^ Lot is here abandoning the explanation by causes,
which seems to him unenlightening, and prefers to it an ex-
planation by motives. The explanation must then be sought
in the psychic state — even in the “mental” state — of the his-
torical agent. It follows naturally that the. event becomes
wholly contiugent since another inffividual with other passions
and other desires would have acted differently. In contrast to
the historian the psychologist will by preference look for
motives; usually he supposes, in fact, that they are “contained
in” the state of consciousness which has provoked the action.
The ideal rational act would therefore be the one for which
the motives would be practically nil and which would be
uniquely inspired by an. objective appreciation of the situation.
The irrational or passionate act will be characterized by the
reverse proportion.
It remains for us to explain the relation between causes and
motives in the everyday case in which they exist side by side.
For example, I can join the Socialist party because I judge that
this party serves the interests of justice and of humanity or
because I believe that it will become the principal historical
force in the years which will follow my joining: these are
causes. And at the same time I can have motives: a feel"
ing of pity or charity for certain classes of the oppressed, a
feeling of shame at being on the “good side of the barricade,”
as Gide says, or again an inferiority complex, a desire to shock
my relatives, etc. What can be meant by the statement that I
have joined the Socialist party for these causes and these
^ Ferdinand Lot. Im fin du monde antique et le dibut du ittoyen dge.
Renaissance du Livref 1927, p. 35.
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 577
motives? Evidently we are dealing with two radically distinct
layers' of meaning. How are we to compare them? How are
we to determine the part played by each of them in the deci-
sion under consideration? This difiSculty, which certainly is
the greatest of those raised by the current distinction between
causes and motives, has never been resolved; few people in-
deed have so much as caught a glimpse of it. Actually under
a different name it amounts to positing the existence of a con-
flict between the will and the passions. But if the classic
theory is discovered to be incapable of assigning to cause and
motive their proper influence in the simple instance when they
join together to produce a single decision, it will be wholly
impossible® for it to explain or even to conceive of a conflict
between causes and motives, a conflict in which each group
would urge its individual decision. Therefore we must start
over again from the beginning.
To be sure, the cause is objective; it is the state of con-
temporary things as it is revealed to a consciousness. It is
objective that the Roman plebs and aristocracy were corrupted
by the time of Constantine or that the Catholic Church is
ready to favor a monarch who at the time of Clovis will help
it triumph over Arianism. Nevertheless this state of affairs can
be revealed only to a for-itself since in general the for-itself is
the being by which “there is” a world. Better yet, it can be
revealed only to a for-itself which chooses itself in this or
that particular way — that is, to a for-itself which has made its
own individuality. The for-itself must of necessity have pro-
jected itself in this or that way in order to discover the in-
strumental implications of instrumental-things. Objectively the
knife is an instrument made of a blade and a handle. I can
grasp it objectively as an instrument to slice with, to cut with.
But lacking a hammer, I can just as well grasp the knife as an
instrument to hammer with. I can make use of its handle to
pound in a nail, and this apprehension is no less objective,
^en Clovis appreciates the aid which the Church can fur-
nish him, it is not certain that a group of prelates or even one
particular priest has made any overtures to him, nor even that
any member of the clergy has clearly thought of an alliance
with a Catholic monarch. The only strictly objective Tacts,
those which any for-itself whatsoever can establish, are the
great power of the Church over the people of Gaul and the
» Tr. Sartre says ‘VhoUy possible” (tout & fait possible) which I feel sure
578
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
anxiety of the Church with regard to the Arian heresy. In
order for these established facts to be organized into a cause
for conversion, it is necessary to isolate them from the en-
semble — and thereby to nihilate them — and it is necessary
to transcend them toward a particular potentiality: the
Church’s potentiality objectively apprehended by Clovis
will be to give its support to a converted king. But this
potentiality can be revealed only if the situation is surpassed
toward a state of thin gs which does not yet exist — in short,
toward a nothingness. In a word the world gives counsel
only if one questions it, and one can question it only for a
well-determined end.
Therefore the cause, far from determining the action,
appears only in and through the project of an action. It is
in and through the project of imposing his rule on all of
Gaul that the state of the Western Church appears objectively
to Clovis as a cause for his conversion. In other words the
consciousness which carves out the cause in the ensemble of
the world has already its own structure; it has given its own
ends to itself, it has projected itself toward its possibles, and
it has its own manner of hanging on to its possibilities: this
peculiar manner of holding to its possibles is here affectivity.
This internal organization which consciousness has given to
itself in the form of non-positional self-consciousness is strict-
ly correlative with the carving out of causes in the world.
Now if one reflects on the matter, one must recognize that the
internal structure of the for-itself by which it effects in the
world the upsurge of causes for acting is an “irrational” fact
in the historical sense of the term. Indeed we can easily under-
^ stand rationally the technical usefulness of the conversion of
Clovis under the hypothesis by which he would- have projected
the conquest of Gaul. But we can not do the same with re-
gard to his project of conquest. It is not “self-explanatory.”
Ought it to be interpreted as a result of Clovis’ ambition?
But precisely what is the ambition if not the purpose of con-
quering? How could Clovis* ambition be distinguished from
die precise project of conquering Gaul? Therefore it would
be useless to conceive of this original project of conquest as
“incited” by a pre-existing motive which would be ambition.
It is indeed true that the ambition is a motive since it is
wholly subjectivity. But as it is not distinct from the project
of conquering, we shall say that this first project of his possi-
bilities in the light of which Clovis discovers a cause for
579
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
being converted is precisely the motive. Then all is made clear
and we can conceive of the relations of these three terms:
causes, motives, ends. We are dealing here with a particular
case of beihg-in-the-world: just as it is the upsurge of the
for-itself which causes there to be a world, so here it is the
very being of the for-itself — ^in so far as this being is a pure
project toward an end — which causes there to be a certain
objective structure of the world, one which deserves the name
of cause in the light of this end. The for-itself is therefore the
consciousness of this cause. But this positional consciousness
of the cause is on principle a non-thetic consciousness of
itself as a project toward an end. In this sense it is a motive;
that is, it experiences itself non-thetically as a project, more
or less keen, more or less passionate, toward an end at the very
moment at which it is constituted as a revealing conscious-
ness of the organization of the world into causes.
Thus cause and motive are correlative, exactly as the non-
thetic self-consciousness is the ontological correlate of the thet-
ic' consciousness of the object. Just as the consciousness of
something is self-consciousness, so the motive is nothing other
than the apprehension of the cause in so far as this apprehen-
sion is self-consciousness. But it follows obviously that the
cause, the motive, and the end are the three indissoluble terms
of the thrust of a free and living consciousness which pro-
jects itself toward its possibilities and makes itself defined by
these possibilities.
How does it happen then that the motive appears to the
psychologist as the affective content of a fact of consciousness
as this content determines another fact of consciousness or a
decision? It is because the motive, which is nothing other
than a non-thetic self-consciousness, slips into the past with
this same consciousness and along with it ceases to be living.
^ soon as a consciousness is made-past, it is what I have to
be in the form of the “was.” Consequently when I turn
back toward -my consciousness of yesterday, it preserves its
mtentional significance and its meaning as subjectivity, but,
^ we have seen, it is fixed; it is outside like a thing, since
e past is in-itself. The motive becomes then that of which
ere IS consciousness. It can appear to me in the form of
empincd knowledge”; as we saw earlier, the dead past
1 in the aspect of a practical knowing. It
it ^ toward it so as to make
xpucit and formulate it while guiding myself by the knowl-
580
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
edge which it is for me in the present In this case it is an
object of consciousness; it is this very consciousness of which
I am conscious. It appears therefore — like my memories in
general — simultaneously as mine and as transcendent Ordi-
narily we are surrounded by these motives which we “no
longer enter,” for we not only have to decide concretely to
accomplish this or that act but also to accomplish acdons
which we decided upon the day before or to pursue enter-
prises in which we arc engaged. In a general way conscious-
ness at whatever moment it is grasped is apprehended as
engaged and this very apprehension implies a practical know-
ing of the motives of the engagement or even a thematic and
positional explanation of these causes. It is obvious that the
apprehension of the motive refers at once to the cause, its
correlate, since the motive, even when made-past and fixed in-
itself, at least maintains as its meaning the. fact that it has
been a consciousness of a cause; Le., the discovery of an
objective structure of the world. But as the motive is in-itself
and as the cause is objective, they are presented as a dyad
without ontological distinction; we have seen, indeed, that
our past is lost in the midst of the world. That is why we
put them on the same level and why we are able to speak of
the causes and of the motives' of an action as if they could
enter into conflict or both concur in determined proportion
in a decision.
Yet if the motive is transcendent, if it is only the irreme-
diable being which we have to be in the mode of the “was,”
if like all our past it is separated from us by a breadth of
nothingness, then it can act only if it is recovered; in itself it
is without force. It is therefore by the very thrust of the en-
gaged consciousness that a value and a weight will be con-
ferred on motives and on prior causes. What they have been
does not depend on consciousness, but consciousness has the
duty of maintaining them in their existence in the past I
have willed this or that; here is what remains irremediable
and which even constitutes my essence, since my essence is
what I have been. But the meaning held for me by this desire,
this fear, these objective considerations of the world when
presently I project myself toward my futures — this must be
decided by me alone. I determine them precisely and only
by the very act by which I project myself toward my ends.
The recovery of former motives — or the rejection or new
appreciation of them — is not distinct from the project by
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
■581
which I assign new ends to myself and by which in the light
of these ends I apprehend myself as discovering a supporting
cause in the world. Past motives, past causes, present motives
and causes, future ends, all are organized in an indissoluble
unity by the very upsurge of a freedom which is beyond
causes, motives, and ends.
The result is that a voluntary deliberation is always a
deception. How can I evaluate causes and motives on which
I myself confer their value before all deliberation and by
the very choice which I make of myself? The illusion here
stems from the fact that we endeavor to take causes and mo-
tives for entirely transcendent things which I balance in my
hands like weights and which possess a weight as a perma-
nent property. Yet on the other hand we try to view them as
contents of consciousness, and this is self-contradictory.
Actually causes and motives have only the weight which, my
project — i.e., the free production of the end and of the known
act to be realized — confers upon them. When I deliberate, the
chips are down.® And if I am brought to the point of deliberat-
ing, this is simply because it is a part of my original project
to realize motives by means of deliberation rather than by
some other form of discovery (by passion, for example, or
simply by action, which reveals to me the organized ensemble
of causes and of ends as my language informs me of my
thought). There is therefore a choice of deliberation 'as a
procedure which will make known to me what I project and
consequently what I am. And the chbice of deliberation is
organized with the ensemble motives-causes and ends by free
spontaneity. When the will intervenes, the decision is taken,
and it has no other value than that of making the announce-
ment.
The voluntary act is distinguished from involuntary spon-
taneity in'that the latter is a purely unreflective consciousness
of causes across the pure and simple project of the act. As for
the motive, in the unreflective act it is not an object for
but a simple non-positional self-consciousnesl The strucrcre
of the voluntary act, on the other hand, requires the
ance of a reflective consciousness which apprehends
tive as a quasi-object or which even intends it as 2
object across the consciousness reflected-on. For ths--^'^'
cause, since it is grasped by the intermediary of ^
9 Tr. Les jeux sont faits. Sartre has written a scenario by ^
1947; translated by Louise Varbse, ’•-U.1948.J
S82 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ness reflected-on, is as separated. To adopt Husserl’s famous
expression, simple voluntary reflection by its structure as
reflectivity practices the with regard to the cause; it
holds the cause in suspense, puts it within parentheses. Thus
it can build up a semblance of appreciative deliberation by
the fact that a more profound nihilation separates the reflec-
tive consciousness from the consciousness reflected-on or mo-
tive and by the fact that the cause is suspended. Nevertheless,
as we know, although the result of the reflection is to widen
the gap which separates the for-itself from itself, such is not
its goal. The goal of the reflective scissiparity is, as we have
seen, to recover the reflected-on so as to constitute that un-
realizable totality “In-itself-for-itself,” which is the funda-
mental value posited by the for-itself in the very upsurge of
its being. If, therefore, the will is in essence reflective, its
goal is not so much to decide what end is to be attained since
in any case the chips are down; the profound intention of
the will bears rather on the method of attaining this end
already posited. The for-itself which exists in the voluntary
mode wishes to recover itself in so far as it decides and acts.
It does not wish merely to be carried toward an end, nor to
be the one which chooses itself as carried toward a particular
end; it wishes again to recover itself as a spontaneous project
toward this or that particular end. The ideal of the will is to
be an “in-itself-for-itself” as a project toward a certain end.
This is evidently a reflective ideal and it is the meaning
of the satisfaction which accompanies a judgment such as, “I
have done what I wished to do.” But it is evident that the
reflective scissiparity in general has its foundation in a proj-
ect more profound than itself, a project which for lack of a
better term we called “motivation” in Part Two, Chapter
Three. Now that we have defined cause and mptive, it is
necessary to give to this project which underlies reflection the
name intention. To the extent therefore that the will is
an instance of reflection, the fact of its being placed so
as to act on the voluntary level demands for its foundation
a more profound intention. It is not enough for the psy-
chologist to describe a particular subject as realizing Ns
project in the mode of voluntary reflection; the psychol-
ogist must also be capable of releasing to us the profound
intention, which makes the subject realize his project
in this mode of volition rather than in a wholly
different mode. Moreover, it must be clearly imder-
, BEING AND' DOING: FREEDOM 583
stood that any mode of consciousness whatsoever may .have
produced Ae same realization once the ends are posited by an
original project. Thus we have touched on a more profound
freedom than the will, simply by showing ourselves to be more
exacting than the psychologists; that is, by raising the question
“"Why?” whereas they limit themselves to establishing the mode
of consciousness as volitional.
This brief study does not attempt to exhaust the ques-
tion of the will; on the contrary, it would be desirable to
attempt a phenomenological description of the will for itself.
But this is not our goal; we hope simply that we have shown
that the will is not a privileged manifestation of freedom but
that it is a psychic event of a peculiar structure which is con-
stituted on the same plane as other psychic events and which
is supported, neither more nor less ihm the others, by an
original, ontological freedom.
By the same token freedom appears as an unanalyzable
totality; causes, motives, and ends, as well as the mode of
apprehending causes, motives, and ends, are organized in a
unity within the compass of this freedom and must be under-
stood in terms of it. Does this mean that one must view
freedom as a series of capricious jerks comparable to the
Epicurean clinamen? Am I free to wish anything whatso-
ever at any moment whatsoever? And must I at each instant
when I wish to explain this or that project encounter the
irrationality of a free and contingent choice? Inasmuch as it
has seemed that the recognition of freedom had as its con-
sequence these dangerous conceptions which are complete-
ly contradictory to experience, worthy thinkers have turned
away from a belief in freedom. One could even state that
determinism — if one were careful not to confuse it with
fatalism — is “more human” than the theory of free will. In
fact while determinism throws into relief the strict condition-
ing of our acts, it does at least give the reason for each of
them. 'And if it is strictly limited to the psychic, if it gives
up looking for a conditioning in the ensemble of the uni-
verse, it shows that the reason for our acts is in ourselves: we
act as we are, and our acts contribute to making us.
Let us consider more closely however the few certain re-
sults which our analysis has enabled us to attain. We have
shown that freedom is actually one with the being of the For-
itselt; human reality is free to the exact extent that it has to
® own nothingness. It has to be this nothingness, as we
584 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
have seen, in multiple dimensions: first, by temporalizing it-
self i.e., by being: always at a distance from itself, which
means that it can never let itself be determined by its past to
perform this or that particular act; second, by rising up as
consciousness of something and (of) itself — i.e., by being
presence to itself and not simply self, which implies that
nothing exists in consciousness which is not consciousness of
existing and that consequently nothing external to conscious-
ness can motivate it; and finally, by being transcendence — i.e.,
not something which would first be in order subsequently to
put itself into relation with this or that end, but on the con-
trary, a being which is originally a project — i.e., which is
defined by its end.
Thus we do not intend here to speak of anything arbi-
trary or capricious. An existent which as consciousness is
necessarily separated from all others because they are in con-
, nection with it only to the extent that they are for it, an ex-
istent which decides its past in the form of a tradition in the
light of its future instead of allowing it purely and simply to
determine its present, an existent which makes known to itself
what it is by means of something other than it (that is, by an
end which it is not and which it projects from the other side
of the world) — ^this is' what We call a free existent. This does
not mean that I am free to get up or to sit down, to enter or to
go out, to flee or to face danger — if one means by freedom
here a pure capricious, unlawful, gratuitous, and incomprehen-
sible contingency. To be sure, each one of my acts, even the
most trivial, is entirely free in the sense which we have just
defined; but this does not -mean that my act can be anything
whatsoever or even that it is unforeseeable. Someone, never-
theless, may object and ask how if my act can be understood
neither in terms of the state of the world nor in terms of the
ensemble of my past taken as an irremediable thing, it could
possibly be anything but gratuitous; Let us look more closely.
Common opinion does not hold that to be free means
only to choose oneself. A choice is said to be free if it is such
that it could have been other than what it is. I start out on a
hike with friends. At the end of several hours of walking my
fatigue increases and finally becomes very painful. At first I
resist and then suddenly I let myself go, I give up, I throw
my knapsack down on the side of the road and let myself
fall down beside it. Someone will reproach me for my act and
will mean thereby that I was free^ — that is, not only was my
suiBS ai "sadois aq; jo XiijEnb „snoure}unoui„ sip Suusaoo
- sip -loj ‘sqjBd aqj jo sssuqgnoj Aqsoi sqj 03 Jissiujq Supdepe
JOJ ‘ttiR spunojjns qoiq/A p[iOM 3 q 3 . SuusAOosip’ Joj '30301
-ruqsui psSsiiAud sip sb Xbai auios ui uiiq'03 siBsdds 31 ‘.q3Bq
B 03 SB 3 X 03 Jissuiiq s3aiS aq ‘.anSpBj siq sbaoi Wq3 3nq
‘asjnoo JO ‘panSpBj si aq 3 Bq 3 auL 03 uiBidxa piAi aq ‘suoiUBd
-uioo Aui JO auo uoijsanb j jj 'ajmoaijs AjBpuooas b sb pa^BiS
.3301 aq pinoAV 31 qoiqM or aoioqo jaSiBi b jo aApoadsiad
3q3 onpiM pauiBidxa . 3011 si 31 laipaqAi aas 03 piiB jias3i
aaioqo siq3 ainiuBxa 03 jduiapB 03 XjBssaoau si 31 iaaioqo b
iCjno Suiaq sb paj^BSASJ sjb qoiq/A *soaAi 3 jBn.3aBj papBo-os 03
j[ 3 sauo ssaappB 03 dpq 30U ipA\ 31 ‘aiqBJBaqun sb anSpBj b
jagns HBD j suopipuoo 3BqA\ lapun puB 3 si 3 pun 03"qsTAS.
I sjojsjaqj ji -anSpBj Aux jajjns j qan^Av m Abm aip 03 naAiS
3UIBU B Apio SI puB nsAiS jBipoBj B aq 30U UBO „Assis„ B aq
03 AlJBiiuns 713531 3sanbuo3 siqj si 31 i 3 sanbuoa 03 auo 331001
pinoM qoiqAi u 9 aj 8 b 30U si 31 isjouoq jo auoiq3 b Suuanbuoo
psfojd 03 SI snopfquiB aq 03 J^qj naas aABq a^ -aiaq sn AjspBS
30U UBO uopBiqBAS UB qoiis ‘uopipadxa J 3 q 3 ouB uo am aqB3 03
Bapi poo§ B aq pinoA\ 31 jou jo laipaqAV Suipioap jo uopsanb
B asojB ajaqj uaqM junoooB ojui siip aqB 3 pinoo auo qknoip
-jB puB asBO aqj uo SuiJBaq [BopoBid b SBq XjqBiuapuii uop
-BniBAa siqj q§noq 3 iB jng pou ojb siaipo aip 3 Bq 3 puB „i{ssis„
B uiB I 3 Bqj PBj aq 3 uioij suia3S aouaiapip aq3 3 Bq 3 Abs ipAi
suoauios snSijBj Jiaqj lagns Aaip 3Bq3 aJojajaq3
aaddBq 31 saop avoji ,/uib j sb panSpBj sb„ sasodind [Boipsid
I[B joj ajB Aaqi 3Bq3 — aprqouoo sj 9 q 30 -JOj-saipoq Juo jo uop
-Biapisuoo OApoafqo ub ja3jB sassau3iAi puB — apnpuoo XjiBusn
I ‘sapiApoafqns juajajjip ui jnooo qoiqAi S3uaAa oiqoiCsd duvd
-uioo 03 aiqissod 30U si 31 qSnoqjiB 3Bq3 os j sb Suiuibjj atuBS
3ip AjpopoBid pBq aABq Aaqj iain aqq — ^qjpaq pooS ui ajB
suoiuEdnioo Am :uoi3sanb ppuassa aip pajisod si aian
'a[qBjap3m sb an§pBj aqj
sia^gns dn 3nisu qoiqAi jiasq-jo^j aApoapai aq3 si 31 jnq ‘jjasji
ui SuiqjvtuB aq jaAau qiAi JI '3iqBiaio3Ui jo apBJBaq sb am 03
jBaddB qi/A angpBj aqj jBtp aoBid siqj uo Ajuo si 31 -JiaSiCin 03
nopBjaj poipBjd b puB anjBA b 31 uo jajuoo 03 puB 31 aAq
03 japjo UI an3pBj Am uodn papajip si ssausnoiosuoo aAp
-oagaj b ‘si 3Bqx 'anSpBj Am uaffns j ‘ured 03 joadsaj q3TAi mbs
aM SB ‘jaipBj tanSpBj Am jo uoisuaqajddB aApBidiua3uo3 b qs
3B 300 SI 31 'SI 31 3BqM JOJ 31 asfBj sn jsi ‘JOAaMoq iuop
-uajui auiBS siip joj uopBjajdjajui ub apiAOjd 03 jqSno Xquaj
®Ai ‘JI JSAOoaj 03 puB anSpBj Am japisuoo 03 qaas op i uaqM
SSaMONIHXOiSE QNV OiSLiaa
98S
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
587
way it is this light sunburn on the back of his neck and this
slight ringing in his ears which will enable him to realize a
direct contact with the sun. Finally the feeling of effort is for
him that of fatigue overcome. But as' his fatigue is nommg
but the passion which he endures so that the dust of the
highways, the burning of the sun, the roughness of the roads
may exist to the fullest, his effort (i.e., this sweet familianty
with a fatigue which he loves, to wMch he abandons himself
and which nevertheless he himself directs) is given as a way - ..
of appropriating the mountain, of suffering it to the end and
being victor over it We shall see in the next chapter what is
the meaning of the word having and to what extent doing"
is a method of appropriating. Thus my companion’s fatigue is
lived in a vaster project of a trusting abandon to nature, of a
passion consented to in order that it may exist at full strength,-
and at the same time the project of sweet mastery and
appropriation. It is only in and through this project that the
fatigue will be able to be understood and that it will have
meaning for him.
But this meaning and this vaster, more profound- proj-
ect are still by themselves Unselbstandig. They are not suffi-
cient For they precisely presuppose a particular relation of my
companion to his body, on the one hand, and to things, on
the other. It is easy to see, indeed, that there are as m^ny ways
of existing one’s body as there are For-itselfs although nat-
urally certain original structures are invariable and in each
For-itself constitute human-reality. We shall be concerned
elsewhere with what is incorrectly called the relation of the
individual to space and to the conditions of a universal truth.
For the moment we can conceive in connection with thou-
sands of meaningful events that there is, for example, a certain
type of flight before facticity, a flight which consists precisely
in abandoning oneself to this facticity; that, is, in short, in
trustingly reassuming it and loving it in order to try to re-
cover it. This original project of recovery is therefore a cer-
tain-choice which the For-itself makes of itself in the pres-
ence of the problem of being. Its project remains a nihilation,
out this nihilation turns back upon the in-itself which it ni-
hilat^and expresses itself by a particular valorization of factic-
ity. This is expressed especially by the thousands of behavior
patterns called abandon. To abandon oneself to fatigue to
warmth, to hunger, to thirst, to let oneself fall back upon a
nair or a bed with sensual pleasure, to relax, to attempt to
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 587
way it is this light sunburn on the back of neck and this
slight ringing in his ears which will enable hun to realize a
direct contact with the sun. Finally the feelmg of effort is for
him that of fatigue overcome. But as’ his fatigue is nothing
but the passion which he endures so that the dust of the
highways, the burning of the sun, the roughness of the roads
may exist to the fullest, his effort (I’.e., this sweet familiarity
with a fatigue which he loves, to which he abandons himself
and which nevertheless he himself directs) is given as a way
of appropriating the mountain, of suffering it to the end and
being victor over it. We shall see in the next chapter what is
the meaning of the word having and to what extent doing'
is a method of appropriating. Thus my companion’s fatigue is
lived in a vaster project of a trusting abandon to nature, of a
passion consented to in order that it may exist at full strength,
and at the same time the project of sweet mastery and
appropriation. It is only in and through this project that the
fatigue will be able to be understood and that it will have
meaning for him.
But this meaning and this vaster, more profound- proj-
ect are still by themselves Unselbstandig. They are not suffi-
cient For they precisely presuppose a particular relation of my
companion to his body, on the one hand, and to things, on
the other. It is easy to see, indeed, that there are as many ways
of existing one’s body as there are For-itselfs although nat-
urally certain original structures are invariable and in each
For-itself constitute human-reality. We shall be concerned
elsewhere with what is incorrectly called the relation of the
individual to space and to the conditions of a universal truth.
For the moment we can conceive in connection with thou-
sands of meaningful events that there is, for example, a certain
type of flight before facticity, a flight which consists precisely
in abandoning oneself to this facticity; that is, in short, in
trustingly reassuming it and loving it in order to try to re-
cover it. This original project of recovery is therefore a cer-
tam choice which the For-itself makes of itself in the pres-
ence of the problem of being. Its project remains a nihilation,
out this nihilation turns back upon the in-itself which it ni-
®^Pr®sses itself by a particular valorization of factic-
IS expressed especially by the thousands of behavior
patterns called abandon. To abandon oneself to fatigue to
S ' •“ upon a
nair or a bed with sensual pleasure, to relax, to attempt to
588 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
let oneself be drunk in by one’s own body, not now beneath
the eyes of others as in masochism but in the original soli-
tude of the For-itself — none of these types of behavior can
ever be confined to itself. We perceive this clearly since in
another person they irritate or attract. Their condition is an
initial project of the recovery of the body; that is, an attempt
at a solution of the problem of the absolute (of the In-itself-
for-itself ) .
This ^initial form can itself be limited to a profound
acceptance of facticity; the project of “making oneself body”
will mean then a happy abandon to a thousand little passing
gluttonies, to a thousand little desires, a thousand little weak-
nesses. One may recall from Joyce’s Ulysses Mr. Bloom satis-
fying his natural needs and inhaling with favor “the intimate
odor rising from beneath him.” But it is also possible (and
this is the case with my companion) that by means of the
body and by compliance to the body, the For-itself seeks to
recover the totality of the non-conscious — that is, the
whole universe as the ensemble of material things. In this case
the desired synthesis of the in-ltself with the for-itself will be
the quasi-pantheistic synthesis of the totality of the in-itself
with the for-itself which recovers it. Here the body is the in-
strument of the synthesis; it loses itself in fatigue, for ex-
ample, in order that this in-itself may exist to the fullest. And
since it is the body which the for-itself exists as its own, this
passion of the body coincides for the for-itself with the proj-
ect of “making the in-itself exist.” The ensemble of this
attitude — ^which is that of one of my companions — can be ex-
pressed by the dim feeling of a kind of mission: he is going
on this expedition because the mountain which he is going to
climb and the forests which he is going to cross exist; his
mission is to be the one by whom their meaning will be made
manifest. Therefore he attempts to be the one who founds
them in their very existence.
We shall return in the next chapter to this appropria-
tive relation between the for-itself and the world, but we do
not yet have at hand the elements necessary to elucidate it
fully. In any case it is evident following our analysis that the
way in which my companion suffers his fatigue necessarily
demands — if we are to understand it — that we imdertake a
regressive analysis which will lead us back to an initial proj-
ect. Is this project we have outlined finally selbstdndig? Cer-
tainly and it can be easily proved to be so. In fact by going
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
589
further and further back we have reached the original relation
which the for-itself chooses with its facticity and with the
world. But this original relation is nothing other than the for-
itself’s being-in-the-world inasmuch as this being-in-the-world
'is a choice — that is, we have reached the original type of ni-
hhation by which the for-itself has to be its own nothingness.
No interpretation of this can be attempted, for it would im-
plicitly suppose the being-in-the-world of the for-itself just
as all the demonstrations attempted by Euclid’s Postulate im-
plicitly suppose the adoption of this postulate.
Therefore if I apply this same method to interpret the way
in which I suffer my fatigue, I shall first apprehend in myself a
distrust of my body — ^for example, a way of wishing not “to
have anything to do with it,” wanting not to take it into
account, which is simply one of numerous possible modes in
which I can exist my body. I shall easily discover an analo-
gous distrust with respect to the in-itself and, for example, an
original project for recovering the in-itself which I nihilate
through the intermediacy of others, which project in turn
refers me to one of the initial projects which we enumerated
in our preceding discussion. Hence my fatigue instead of
being suffered “flexibly” will be grasped “sternly” as an im-
portunate phenomenon which I want to get rid of — and this
simply because it incarnates my body and my brute contin-
gency in the midst of the world at a time when my project
is to preserve my body and my presence in the world by means
of the looks of others. I am referred to myself as well as to
my original project; that is, to my being-in-the-world in so far
as this being is a choice.
We are not attempting to disguise how much this method
of andysis leaves to be desired. This is because everything re-
rnains still to be done in this field. The problem indeed is to
disengage the meanings implied by an act — by every act — and
to proceed from there to richer and more profound meanings
until we encounter the meaning which does not imply any
o&er meaning and which refers only to itself. This ascending
dialect is practiced spontaneously by most people; it can even
be established that in knowledge of oneself or of another there
IS given a spontaneous comprehension of this hierarchy of
interpretations. A gesture refers to a Weltanschauung and we
sense it. But nobody has attempted a systematic disengagement
of the meanings implied by an act. TTiere is only one school
which has based its approach on the same original evidence as
590
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
we, and that is the Freudian. For Freud as for us an act can
not be limited to itself; it refers immediately to more profound
structures. And psychoanalysis is the method which enables us
to make these structures explicit. Freud like us asks: under
what conditions is it possible that this particular person has
performed this particular act? Like us he refuses to interpret
the action by the antecedent moment — i.e., to conceive of a
horizontal psychic determinism. The act appears to him sym-
bolic; that is, it seems to him to express a more profound de-
sire which itself could be interpreted only in terms of an
initial determination of the subject’s libido. Freudi however,
aims at constituting a vertical determinism. In addition be-
cause of this bias his conception necessarily is going to refer
to the subject’s past. Affectivity for Freud is at the basis of
the act in the form of psycho-physiological drives. But this
affectivity is originally in each of us a tabula rasa; for Freud
xthe external circumstances and, so to speak, the history of
the subject will decide whether this or that drive will be fixed
on this or that object. It is the child’s situation in the family
which will determine in him the birth of the Oedipus com-
plex; in other societies composed of families of another
type (such as, for example, among primitive peoples on the
Coral Islands in the Pacific) this complex could not be
formed. Furthermore it is again external circumstances which
will decide whether at the age of puberty this complex will be
“resolved” or, on the contrary, will remain the pole of the
sexual life. Consequently through the intermediacy of history
Freud’s vertical determinism remains axised on a horizontal
determinism. To be sure, a particular symbolic act expresses
an underlying, contemporaneous desire just as this desire
manifests a more profound complex and all this within the
unity of a single psychic process; but the complex nonetheless
pre-exists its symbolic manifestation. It is the past which has
constituted it such as it is and in accordance with the classic
connections, transfer, condensation, etc., which we find
mentioned not only in psychoanalysis but in all attempts at a
deterministic reconstruction of the psychic life. Consequent-
ly the dimension of the future does not exist for psychoanaly-
sis. Human reality loses one of its ekstases and must be
interpreted solely by a regression toward the past from the
standpoint of the present. At the same time the fundamental
structures of the subject, which are signified by its acts, are
not so signified for him but for an objective witness who uses
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
591
discursive methods to make these meanings explicit. No pre-
ontological comprehension of the meamng of his acts is grant-
ed to the subject. And this is just, since in spite of every-
thing his acts are only a result of the past, which is on
principle out of reach, instead of seeking to inscribe their goal
in the future.
Thus we should restrict ourselves to taking the psycho-
analytic method as our inspiration; that is, we should attempt
to disengage the meanings of an act by proceeding from the
principle that every action, no matter how trivial, is not the
simple effect of the prior psychic state and does not result
from a linear determinism but rather is integrated as a
secondary structure in global structures and finally in the
totality which- I am. Otherwise, in fact, I should have t&
understand myself either as a horizontal flux of phenomena,
each one of which is externally conditioned by the preceding
— or as a supporting substance for a flow, a substance de-
prived of the meaning of its modes. Both these conceptions
would lead us to confuse the for-itself with the in-itself .
But if we accept the method of psychoanalysis — and we
shall discuss this at length in the following chapter — ^we must
apply it in a reverse sense. Actually we conceive of every act as
a comprehensible phenomenon, and we do not admit any deter-
ministic “chance” as Freud does. But instead of understanding
the considered phenomenon in terms of the past, we con-
ceive of the comprehensive act as a turning back of the future
toward the present. The way in which I suffer my fatigue
is ia no way dependent on the chance difiBculty of the slope
which I am climbing or on the more or less restless night
which I have spent; these factors can contribute to con-
stituting my fatigue itself but not to the way in which I suffer
it. But we refuse to view this as one of Adler’s disciples
would, as an expression of an inferiority complex, for ex-
ample, in the sense that this complex would be a prior forma-
tion. That a certain passionate and tense way of struggling
agamst the fatigue can .express what is called an inferiority
complex we shall not deny. But the inferiority complex itself
for-itself in the world in the presence
o the Other. As such it is always transcendence, as such again
t is a way of choosing myself. This inferiority which I strug-
g e agamst and which nevertheless I recognize, this I have
indicated by my various
p terns of failure behavior”; but to be exact it is nothing
592
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
other than the organized totality of my failure behavior, as a
projected plan, as a general device of my being, and each
attitude of failure is itself transcendence since each time I
surpass the real toward my possibilities. To give in to fatigue,
for example, is to transcend the path by causing it to con-
stitute in itself the meaning of “a path too difficult to tra-
verse.” It is impossible seriously to consider the feeling of
inferiority without determining it in terms of the future and
of my possibilities. Even assertions such as “I am ugly,” “I am
stupid,” etc. are by nature anticipations. We are not dealing
here with the pure establishment of my ugliness but with the
apprehension of the coefficient of adversity which is presented
by women or by society to my enterprises. And this can be
discovered only through and in the choice of these enter-
prises. Thus the inferiority complex is a free and global proj-
ect of myself as inferior before others; it is the way in which
l' choose to assume my being-for-others, the free solution
which I give to the Other’s existence, that insuperable scandal.
Thus it is necessary to understand my reactions of inferiority
and my failure behavior in terms of the free outline of my
inferiority as a choice of myself in the world.
We grant to the psychoanalysts that every human- reaction
is a priori comprehensible. But we reproach them for having
misunderstood just this initial “comprehensibility” as is shown
by their trying to explain the reaction under consideration by
means of a prior reaction, which would reintroduce causal
mechanism; comprehension must be otherwise defined. Every
project is comprehensible as a project of itself toward a pos-
sible. It is comprehensible first in so far as it offers a rational
content which is immediately apprehensible — I place my
knapsack on the ground in order to rest for a moment. This
means that we immediately apprehend the possible which it
projects and the end at which it aims. In the second place
it is comprehensible in that the possible under consideration
refers to other possibles, these to still others, and so on to
the ultimate possibility which I am. The comprehension is
effected in two opposed senses: by a regressive psychoanalysis
one ascends back from the considered act to my ultimate possi-
ble; and by a synthetic progression one redescends from this
ultimate possible to the considered act and grasps its integra-
tion in the total form.
This form which we call our ultimate possibility is not
just one possible among others — not even though it be, as
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
593
Heidegger claims, the possibility of dying or of “no longer
realizing any presence in the world,” Every particular possi-
bility, in fact, is articulated in an ensemble. It is necessary
to conceive of this ultimate possibility as the unitary syn-
thesis of all our actual possibles; each of these possibles re-
sides in an undifferentiated state in the ultimate possibility
until a particular circumstance comes to throw it into relief
without, however, thereby suppressing its quality of belong-
ing to the totality. Indeed we pointed out in Part Two that the
perceptive apprehension of any object whatsoever is effected
on the ground of the world.^^ By this we meant that what the
psychologists are accustomed to call “perception” can not be
limited to objects which are strictly “seen” or “understood”
etc. at a certain instant but that the objects considered refer
by means of implications and various significations to the
totality of the existent in-itself from the standpoint of which
they are apprehended. Thus it is not true that I proceed by
degrees from that table to the room where I am and then
going out pass from there to the hall, to the stairway, to the
street in order finally to conceive as the result of a passage to
the limit, the world as the sum of all existents. Quite the
contrary, I can not perceive any instrumental thing whatso-
ever unless it is in terms of the absolute existence of all exis-
tents, for my first being is being-in-the-world.
Thus we find that for man in so far as “there are” things,
there is in things a perpetual appeal toward the integration
which makes us apprehend things by descending from the
total integration which is immediately realized down to this
particular structure which is interpreted only in relation to
this totality. But on the other hand if there is a world, it is
because we rise up into the world suddenly and in totality.
We have observed, in fact, in that same chapter devoted to
transcendence, that the in-itself by itself alone is not capable
of any unity as a world. But our upsurge is a passion in this
sense that we lose ourselves in nihilation in order that a world
may exist. Thus the first phenomenon of being in the world is
the original relation between the totality of the in-itself or
world and my own totality detotalized; I choose myself as a
whole in the world which is a whole. Just as I come from
the world to a particular “this,” so I come from myself as a
totality to the outline of one of my particular pos-
sibilities since I can apprehend a particular “this” on the
Part Two, Chapter Three.
594
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ground of the world only on the occasion of a particular proj-
ect of myself. But in this case just as I can apprehend a
particular “this” only on the ground of the world by sur-
passing it toward this or that possibility, so I can project
myself beyond the “this” toward this or that possibility only
on the ground of my ultimate and total possibility. Thus
my ultimate and total possibility, as the original integra-
tion of all my particular possibles, and the world as the
totality which comes to existents by my upsurge into being
are two strictly correlative notions. I can perceive the ham-
mer (i.e., outline a plan of “hammering” with it) only on the
ground of the world; but conversely I can outline this act of
“hammering” only on the ground of the totality of myself and
in terms of that totality.
Thus the fundamental act of freedom is discovered; and it
is this which gives meaning to the particular action which I
can be brought to consider. This constantly renewed act is not
distinct from my being; it is a choice of myself in the world
and by the same token it is a discovery of the world. This
enables us to avoid the perilous reef of the unconscious which
psychoanalysis meets at the start. If nothing is in conscious-
ness which is not a consciousness of being, some will say to
us by way of objection that then this fundamental choice must
of necessity be a conscious choice. They will ask, “Can you
maintain that when you yield to fatigue, you are conscious of
all the implications which this fact supposes?” We shall reply
that we are perfectly conscious of them. Only this conscious-
ness itself must have for its limit the structure of conscious-
ness in general and of the choice which we are making.
So far as the latter is concerned, we must insist on the
fact that the question here is not of a deliberate choice. This
is not because the choice is less conscious or less explicit than
a deliberation but rather because it is the foundation of all
deliberation and because as we have seen, a deliberation re-
quires an interpretation in terms of an original choice. There-
fore it is necessary to defend oneself against the illusion which
would make of original freedom a positing of causes and
motives as objects, then a decision from the standpoint of
these causes and these motives. Quite the contrary, as soon as
there are cause and motive (that is, an appreciation of things
and of the structures of the world) there is already a positing
of ends and consequently a choice. But this does not mean
that the profound choice is thereby unconscious. It is simply
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 595
one with the consciousness which we have of ourselves. 'Hiis
consciousness, as we know, can be only non-positional; it is
we-as-consciousness since it is not distinct from our being.
And as our being is precisely our original choice, the con-
sciousness (of) the choice is identical with the self-conscious-
ness which we have. One must be conscious in order to
' choose, and one must choose in order to be conscious. Choice
and consciousness are one and the same thing. This is what
many psychologists have felt when they declared that con-
sciousness was “selection.” But because they havp not traced
this selection back to its ontological foundation, they have re-
mained on a level in which the selection appeared as a
gratuitous function of a consciousness in other respects sub-
stantial. This reproach may in particular be leveled against
Bergson. But if it has been well established that conscious-
ness is a nihilation, the conclusion is that to be conscious of
ourselves and to choose ourselves are one and the same. This
is the explanation of the difficulties which moralizers like
Gide have met when they wanted to define the purity of the
feelings. What difference is there, Gide asked, between a
willed feeling and an experienced feeling?ii Actually there is
no difference. “To will to love” and to love are one since to
love is to choose oneself as loving by assuming consciousness
of loving. If the tcccoxco is free, it is a choice.
We have remarked sufficiently — in particular in the chap-
ter concerning Temporality — ^that the Cartesian cogito must
be extended. In fact, as we have seen, to assume self-con-
sciousness never means to assume a consciousness of the in-
stant; for the instant is only one view of the mind and even
if it existed, a consciousness- which would apprehend itself
in the instant would no longer apprehend anything. I can
assume consciousness of myself only as a particular man en-
gaged in this or that enterprise, anticipating this or that
success, fearing this or that result, and by means of the en-
semble of these anticipations, outlining his whole figure.
Indeed it is thus that I am apprehending myself at this
moment when I am writing; I am not the simple perceptive
consciousness of my hand which is making marks on the
paper. I am well in advance of this hand ail the way to the
- completion of the book and to the meaning of this book —
aud of philosophical activity in general — ^in my life. It is
within the compass of this project (i.e., within the compass
"^Journal des faux monnayeurs. (The Counterfeiters.)
596
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
of what I am) that there are inserted certain projects toward
more restricted possibilities such as that of presenting this or
that idea in this or that way or of ceasing to write for a mo-
ment or of paging through a volume in which I am looking
for this or that reference, etc. Nevertheless it would be an
error to believe that there is an analytical and differentiated
consciousness corresponding to this global choice. My ulti-
mate and initial project — ^for these are but one — is, as we shall
see, always the outline of a solution of the problem of being.
But this solution is not first conceived and then realized; we
are this solution. We make it exist by means of our' very
engagement, and therefore we shall be able to apprehend it
only by living it. Thus we are always wholly present to our-
selves; but precisely because we are wholly present, we can
not hope to have an analytical and detailed consciousness of
what we are. Moreover this consciousness can be only non-
thetic.
On the other hand, the world by means of its very articu-
lation refers to us exactly the image of what we are. Not, as
we have seen so many times, that we can decipher this image
— i.e., break it down and subject it to analysis — but
because the world necessarily appears to us as we are. In fact
it is by surpassing the world toward ourselves that we make
it appear such as it is. We choose the world, not in its contex-
ture as in-itself but in its meaning, by choosing ourselves.
Through the internal negation by denying that we are the
world, we make the world appear as world, and this internal
negation can exist only if it is at the same time a projection
toward a possible. It is the very way in which I entrust my-
self to the inanimate, in which I abandon myself to my body
(or, on the other hand, the way in v/hich I resist either one
of these) which causes the appearance of both my body and
the inanimate world with their respective value. Consequently
there also I enjoy a full consciousness of myself and of my
fundamental projects, and this time the consciousness is posi-
tional. Nevertheless, precisely because it is positional, what
it releases to me is the transcendent image of what I am. The
value of things, their instrumental role, their proximity and
real distance (which have no relation to their spatial prox-
imity and distance) do nothing more than to outline my
image — ^that is, my choice. My clothing (a uniform or a lounge
suit, a soft or a starched shirt) whether neglected or cared
for, carefully chosen or ordinary, my furniture, the street on
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 597
which I live, the city in which I reside, the books with which
I surround myself, the recreation which I enjoy, everything
which is mine (that is, finally, the world of which I am per-
petually conscious, at least by way of a meaning implied by
the object which I look at or use): all this informs me of
my choice — ^that is, my being. But such is the structure of
the positional consciousness that I can trace this knowledge
back to a subjective apprehension of myself, and it refers me
to other objects which I produce or which I dispose of in
connection with the order of the preceding without being
able to perceive that I am thus more and more sculpturing
my figure in the world. Thus we are fully conscious of the
choice which we are. And if someone objects that in accor-
dance with these observations it would be necessary to be con-
scious not of our being-chosen but of choosing ourselves, we
shall reply that this consciousness is expressed by the two-
fold “feeling” of anguish and of responsibility. Anguish,
abandonment, responsibility, whether muted or full strength,
constitute the quality of our consciousness in so far as this is
pure and simple freedom.
Earlier we posed a question: I have yielded to fatigue, we
said, and doubtless I could have done otherwise but at .
what price? At present we are in a position to answer this.
Our analysis, in fact, ,has just shown us that this act was not
gratuitous. To be sure, it 'was not explained by a motive or
a cause conceived as the content of a prior state of conscious-
ness, but it had to be interpreted in terms of an original proj-
ect of which it formed an integral part. Hence it becomes
evident that we can not suppose that the' act could have been
modified without at the same time supposing a fundamental
modification of my original choice of myself. This way of
yielding to fatigue and of letting myself fall down at the side
of the road expresses a certain initial stiffening against my
body and the inanimate in-itself. It is placed within the com-
pass of a certain view of the world in which difficulties can
appear “not worth the trouble of being tolerated”; or, to be
exact, since the motive is a pure non-thetic consciousness and
consequently an initial project of itself toward an absolute end
(a certain aspect of -the in-itself-for-itself), it is an apprehen-
sion of the world (warmth, distance from the city, uselessness
of effort, etc.) as the cause of my ceasing to walk. Thus this
possible — to stop — theoretically takes on its meaning only in
and through the hierarchy of the possibles which I am in terms
598 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
of the ultimate and initial possible. This does not imply
that I must necessarily stop but merely that I can refuse to
stop only by a radical conversion of my being-in-the-world;
that is, by an abrupt metamorphosis of my initial project —
i.e., by another choice of myself and of my ends. Moreover
this modification is always possible.
The anguish which, when this possibility is revealed, man-
ifests our freedom to our consciousness is witness of this
perpetual modifiability of our initial project. In anguish we
do not simply apprehend the fact that the possibles which we
project are perpetually eaten away by our freedom-to-corae;
in addition we apprehend our choice — Le., ourselves — as
unjustifiable. This means that we apprehend our choice as
not deriving from any prior reality but rather as being
about to serve as foundation for the ensemble of significations
which constitute reality. Unjustifiability is not only the
subjective recognition of the absolute contingency of our
being but also that of the interiorization and recovery of this
contingency on our own account. For the choice — as we shall
see — tissues from the contingency of the in-itself which it
nihilates and transports it to the level of the gratuitous deter-
mination of the for-itself by itself. Thus we are perpetually
engaged in our choice and perpetually conscious of the fact
that we ourselves can abruptly invert this choice and “re-
verse steam”; for we project the future by our very being, but
our existential freedom perpetually eats it away as we make
known to ourselves what we are by means of the future but
without getting a grip on this future which remains always
possible without ever passing to the rank of the real. Thus
we are perpetually threatened by the nihilation of our actual
choice and perpetually threatened with choosing ourselves —
and consequently with becoming — other than we are. By the
sole fact that our choice is absolute, it is fragile; that is, by
positing our freedom by means of it, we posit by the same
stroke the perpetual possibility that the choice may become
a “here and now” which has been made-past in the inter-
ests of a “beyond” which I shall be.
Nevertheless let us thoroughly understand that our actual
choice is such that it furnishes us with no motive for making
it past by means of a further choice. In fact, it is this origi-
nal choice which originally creates all causes and all motives
which can guide us to partial actions; it is this which arranges
the world with its meaning, its instrumental-complexes,
599
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
and its coefficient of adversity. The absolute change which
threatens us from our birth until our death remains perpet-
ually unpredictable and incomprehensible. Even if we envis-
age other fundamental attitudes as possible, we shall never
consider them except from outside, as the behavior of Others.
And if we attempt to refer our conduct to them, they shall not
for all that lose their character as external and as transcended-
transcendences. To “understand” them in fact would be al-
ready to have chosen them. We are going to return to this
point.
In addition we must not think of the original choice as
“producing itself from one instant to the next”; this would
be to return to the instantaneous conception of consciousness
from which Husserl was never able to free himself. Since, on
the contrary, it is consciousness which temporalizes itself, we
must conceive of the original choice as unfolding time and
being one with the unity of the three ekstases. To choose
ourselves is to nihilate ourselves; that is, to cause a future to
come to make known to us what we are by conferring a mean-
ing on our past. Thus there is not a succession of instants
separated by nothingness — as with Descartes — such that
my choice at the instant t can not act on my choice of the
instant t. To choose is to effect the upsurge along with my
engagement of a certain finite extension of concrete and con-
tinuous duration, which is precisely that which separates me
from the realization of my original possibles. Thus freedom,
choice, nihilation, temporalization are all one and the same
thing.
Yet the instant is not an empty invention of philosophers.
To be sure, there is no subjective instant when I am engaged
in my task. At this moment, for example, when I am writing
and trying to grasp my ideas and put them in order, there
IS no instant for me, there is only a perpetual pursued-pursuit
of myself toward the ends which define me (the making ex-
plicit of ideas which are to form the basis of this work).
And yet we are perpetually threatened by the instant. That
IS, we are such, by the very choice of our freedom, that we
can always cause the instant tor'appear as the rupture of our
ekstatic unity. What then is the instant? In the process of
temporalization the instant can not be cut off from a concrete
project; we have Just shown this. But neither can it be
identified with the initial term or with the -final term (if it
IS to exist) of this process. For both of these terms are incor-
600
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
porated in the totality of the process and are an integral part
of it. Therefore neither term has the characteristics of the
instant. The initial term is incorporated in the process of
which it is the initial term in that it is the process’ beginning.
But on the other hand, it is limited by a prior nothingness
in that it is a beginning. The final term is incorporated in
the process which it terminates in that it is the process’ end;
the last note belongs to the melody. But it is followed by a
nothingness which limits it in that it is an end. The in-
stant, if it is to be able to exist, must be limited by a double
nothingness. This is in no way conceivable if it is to be given
ahead of time to all the processes of temporal ization — as
we have shown. But in the very development of our tem-
poralization, we can produce instants if certain processes a-
rise on the collapse of prior processes. The instant will be
then both a beginning and an end. In short, if the end of
one project coincides with the begi nnin g of another proj-
ect, an ambiguous, temporal reality will arise which will be
limited by a prior nothingness in that it is a beginning and
limited by a posterior nothingness in that it is an end. But
this temporal structure will be concrete only if the beginning
is itself given as the end of the process wMch it is making-
past A beginning which is given as the end of a prior project
— such must be the instant. It will exist therefore only if we
are a beginning and an end to ourselves within the unity of a
single act.
Now it is precisely this which is produced in the case of a
radical modification of our fundamental project By the free
choice of this modification, in fact, we teraporalize a project
which we are, and we make known to ourselves by a future the
being which we have chosen; thus the pure present belongs to
the new temporalization as a beginning, and it receives from
the future which has just arisen its own nature as a beginning.
It is the future alone in fact which can turn back on the
pure present in order to qualify it as a beginning; otherwise
this present would be merely any sort of present whatsoever.
Thus the present of the choice belongs already, as an integral
structure, to the newly begun totality. But on ^e other hand,
it is not possible for this choice not to determine itself in
connection with the past which it has to be. The choice is
even, on principle, a decision to apprehend as past the choice
for which it is substituted. A converted atheist is not simply
a believer; he is a believer who has for himself rejected
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
601
atheism, who has made past within him the project of being an
atheist. Thus the new choice is given as a beginning in so
far as it is an end and as an end in so far as it is a beginning;
it is limited by a double nothingness, and as such it realizes a
break in the ekstatic unity of’ our being. However the instant
is by itself only a nothingness, for wherever we cast our
view, we apprehend only a continuous temporalization
which will be in accordance with the direction in which we
look: either the completed and closed series which has just
passed dragging its final term with it — or else the living
temporalization which is begiiming and whose initial term
is caught and dragged along by the future possibility.
Thus every fundamental choice defines the direction of the
pursued-pursuit at the same time that it temporalizes itself.
This does not mean that it gives an initial thrust or that there
is something settled — ^which I can exploit to my profit so
long as I hold myself within the limits of this choice. On
the contrary, the nihilation is pursued- continuously, and
consequentiy the free and continuous recovery of the choice
is" obligatory. This recovery, however, is not made from
instant to' instant while I freely reassume my choice. This
is because there is no instant. The recovery is so narrowly
joined to the ensemble of the process that it has no instan-
taneous meaning and can not have any. But precisely
because it is free and perpetually recovered by freedom, my
choice is limited by freedom itself; that is, it is haunted by
the specter of the instant. In so far as I shall reassume my
choice, the making-past of the process will be effected in
perfect ontological continuity with the present. The process
which is made-past remains organized with the present
nihilation in the form of a practical knowing; that, is,
meaning which is lived and interiorized without ever being
an object for the consciousness which projects itself toward
its own ends. But precisely because I am free I always have
the possibility of positing my immediate past as an object.
This means that even though my prior consciousness was
a pure non-positional consciousness (of) the past while it
constituted itself as an internal negation of the co-present
real and made its meaning known to itself by its ends
posited as “reassumed,” now at the time of the new choice,
consciousness posits its own past as an object; that is,, it
evaluates its past and takes its bearings in relation to it.
This act of objectivizing the immediate past is the same as
602 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the new choice of other ends; it contributes to causing the.
instant to spring forth as the nihilating rupture of the
temporalization.
It will be easier for the reader to understand the results
obtained by this analysis if we compare them to another
theory of freedom — ^for example, to that of Leibniz, For
Leibniz as for us, when Adam took the apple it would have
been possible for him not to take it. But for Leibniz as
for us the implications of this gesture are so numerous and
so r amifi ed that ultimately to declare that it would have been
possible for Adam not to take the apple amounts to saying
that another Adam would have been possible. Thus Adam’s
contingency is the same as his freedom since this contingency
means that this real Adam is surrounded by an infinity
of possible Adams, each one of whom as compared to the
real Adam is characterized by a slight or profound alteration
of all his attributes; that is, ultimately, of his substance.
For Leibniz, then, the freedom claim^ by human reality
is as the organization of three difllerent notions: that man
is free who (1) determines himself rationally to perform
an act; (2) is such that this act is imderstood fully by the
very nature of the one who has committed it; (3) is contin-
gent — that is, exists in such a way that other persons com-
mitting other acts in connection with the same situation
would have been possible. But because of the necessary
connection of possibles, another gesture of Adam would have
•heen possible only for and by another Adam, and the
existence of another Adam implies that of another world.
. We recognize along with Leibniz that Adam’s gesture
engages his whole person and that another gesture could be
understood only in the light of and within the compass of
another persondity in Adam. But Leibniz falls into a necessi-
tarianism completely opposed to the idea of ireedom when
at the outset he establishes the assertion of the substance of
Adam as a premise which will bring in the act of Adam as
one of its partial conclusions; that is, when he reduces the
chronological order to being only a symbolic expression of
the logical order. The result is that on the one hand, the
act is strictly necessitated by the very essence of Adam; also
the contingency which according to Leibniz makes freedom
possible is found wholly contained wi thin the essence of
Adam. And this essence is not chosen by Adam himself but
by God. Thus it is true that the act committed by Adam.
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
603
necessarily derives from Adam’s essence and that it thereby
depends on Adam himself and on no other, which, to be
sure, is one condition of freedom. But Adam’s essence is for
Adam himself a given; Adam has not chosen it; he could
not choose to be Adam. Consequently he does not support
the responsibility for his being. Hence once he himself has
been given, it is of little importance that one can attribute
to him the relative responsibility for his act.
For us, on the contrary, Adam is not defined by an essence
since for human reality essence comes after existence. Adam
is defined by the choice of his ends; that is, by the upsurge
of an ekstatic temporalization which has nothing in common
with the logical order. Thus Adam’s contingency expresses
the finite choice which he has made of himself. But hence-
forth what makes his person known to him is the future
and not the past; he chooses to learn what he is by means
of ends toward which he projects himself — ^that is, by the
totality of his tastes, his likes, his hates, etc., inasmuch as
there is a thematic organization and an inherent meaning
in this totality. Thus we can avoid the objection which we
ofliered to Leibniz when we said, “To be sure, Adam chose
to take the apple, but he did not choose to be Adam.” For
us, indeed, the problem of freedom is placed on the level
of Adam’s choice of himself — ^that is, on the determination
of essence by existence. In addition we recognize with
Leibniz that another gesture of Adam, implying another
Adam, implies another world; but by “another world” we
do not mean a particular organisation of co-possibles such
that the other possible Adam finds his place there, rather
that the revelation of another face of the world will corre-
spond to another being-in-the-world of Adam.
Finally for Leibniz since the possible gesture of the other
Adam is organized in another possible world, it pre-exists
for all eternity — as possible — the realization of the contin-
gent, real Adam. Here again essence precedes existence for
Leibniz, and the chronological order depends on the eternal
order of logic. For us, on the contrary, the possible is only
a pure and unformed possibility of another being such that
it is not existed as possible by a new project of Adam toward
new possibilities. Thus the possible of Leibniz remains
eternally an abstract possible whereas for us the possible
appears only by possibilizing itself; that is, by coming to
announce jo Adam what he is. Consequently the order of
604 ' BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
psychological explanation in the work of Leibniz goes
from past to present to the same extent that this succession
expresses the eternal order of essences; everything is finally
fixed in a logical eternity, and the only contingency is that
of principle, which means that Adam is a postulate of the
divine understanding. For us, on the contrary, the order of
interpretation is strictly chronological; it does not seek to
reduce time to a purely logical concatenation {reason') or
a chronological-logical (cause, determinism). It is inter-
preted therefore from the standpoint of the future.
But what we must especially insist on is that our preceding
analysis is purely theoretical. In theory only, another gesture
of Adam is possible and only within the limits of the total
overthrow of the ends by which Adam chooses himself as
Adam. We have presented things m this way — and hence
we have been able to seem like Leibnizians — so as to pre-
sent our view first with the maximum of simplicity. In actual
fact reality is far more complex. This is because in reality
the order of interpretation is purely chronological and not
logical; the understanding of an act in terms of the original
ends posited by the freedom of the for-itself is not an intel-
lection. And the descending hierarchy of possibles from
the final and initial possible to the derived possible which
we are trying to understand has nothing in common with
the deductive series which goes from a principle to its
consequence. First of all, the connection between the derived
possible (to resist fatigue or to give in to it) and the funda-
mental possible is not a connection of deductibility. It is
the connection between a totality and a partial structure.
The view of the total project enables one to “understand”
the particular structure considered. But the Gestalt school
has shown us that the Pragnanz of the total forms does
not exclude the variability of certain secondary structures.
There are certain lines which I can add to or subtract from
a given figure without altering its specific character. There
are others, on the contrary, which can not be added without
involving the immediate disappearance of the figure and
the appearance of another figure. The same thing is true
with regard to the relation between the secondary possibles
and the fundamental possible or the formal totality of my
possibles. The meaning of the secondary possible considered
refers always, to be sure, to the total meaning which I am.
But other possibles could have replaced this one without
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM*
605
altering the total 'meaning; that is, they could always and
just as well have indicated this totality as the form which
enables them to be understood — or in the ontological order
of realization they could just as well have been projected
as the means of attaining the totality and in the light of
this totality. In short the act of understanding is the inter-
pretation of a factual connection and not the apprehension
of a necessity.
Thus the psychological interpretation of our acts must
frequently return to the Stoic notion of “indifferents.” To
relieve my fatigue, it is indifferent whether I sit down
on the side of the road or whether I take a hundred steps
more in order to stop at the inn which I see from a dis-
tance. This means that the apprehension of the complex,
global form which I have chosen as my ultimate possible
does not sujfice. to account for the choice of one possible rath-
er than another. There is not here an act deprived of motives
and causes but rather a spontaneous invention of motives
and causes, which placed within the compass of my fun-
damental choice thereby enriches it. In the same way each
“this” must appear on the groimd of the world and in the
perspective of my facticity, but neither my facticity nor
the world allows us to understand why I presently grasp
this glass rather than this inkwell as a figure raising itself
on the ground. In relation to these indifferents our freedom
is entire and unconditioned. This fact of choosing one
indifferent possible and then abandoning it for another
will not cause the instant to surge up as the rupture of
duration*, on the contrary, these free choices are all integrated
— even if they are successive and contradictory — in the unity
of my fundamental project. This does not mean that they
are to be apprehended as gratuitous. In fact whatever they
may be, they will always be interpreted in terms of the
ori^al choice; and to the extent that they enrich this
choice and make it concrete, they will always bring with
thein their motive — that is, the consciousness of their cause
or, if you prefer, the apprehension of the situation as artic-
ulated in this or that way.
Another thing which will render the strict appreciation
of the connection between the secondary possible and the
fundamental possible particidarly delicate is the t
there exists no a pr\p\ “ready-reckoner” to
refer in or ■' ine this connection. ^
606
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
trary, it is the for-itself which chooses to consider the
secondary possible as indicative of the fundamental possible.
Just where we have the impression that the free subject is
turning his back on his fundamental goal, we often intro-
duce the observer’s coefficient of error; that is,' we use our
own scales to weigh the relation between the act considered
and the final ends. But the for-itself in its freedom invents
not only primary and secondary ends; by the same stroke it
invents the whole system of interpretation which allows their
interconnections. In no case can there be a question of estab-
lishing a system of universal understanding of the secondary
possibles in terms of the primary possibles: in every instance
the subject himself must furnish his touchstone and his
personal criteria.
Finally the for-itself can make voluntary decisions which
are opposed to the fundamental ends which it has chosen.
These decisions can be only voluntary — that is, reflective.
In fact they can derive only from an error committed either
in good faith or in bad faith against the ends which I
pursue, and this error can be committed only if the ensemble
of motives which I am are discovered in the capacity of an
object by the reflective consciousness. Since the unreflective
consciousness is a spontaneous self-projection toward its
possibilities, it can never be deceived about itself; one must
take care not to hold it responsible for making a mistake
regarding itself when the error is actually a false evaluation of
the objective situation — an error which can bring into the
world consequences absolutely opposed to those which the
unreflective consciousness wanted to effect, without however
there having been any misunderstanding of its proposed
ends. The reflective attitude, on the contrary, involves a
thousand possibilities of - error, not in that it apprehends
the pure motive — i,e., the consciousness reflected-on — as ■ a
quasi-object but in so far as it aims at constituting across
that consciousness reflected-on veritable psychic objects
which are only probable objects, as we have seen in Part
Two, Chapter Tliree, and which can even be false objects. It is
therefore possible for me a& regards errors concerning my-
self to impose upon myself reflectively — i.e., on the volun-
tary plane — projects which contradict my initial project
without, however, fundamentally modifying the initial proj-
ect. Thus, for example, if my initial project aims at choosing
myself as inferior in the nudst of others (what is called
BEING AND -DOING: FREEDOM
607
the inferiority complex), and if stuttering, for example, is
a behavior which is understood and interpreted in terms of
the primary project, I can for social reasons and through a
misunderstanding of my own choice of inferiority decide
to cure myself of stuttering. I can even succeed in it,
yet without having ceased to feel myself and to will myself
to be inferior. In fact I can obtain a result by using merely
technical methods. This is what we usually call a voluntary
self-reform. But these results will only displace the infirmity
from which I suffer; another will arise in its place and will
in its own way express the total end which I pursue. As this
profound inefficacy of a voluntary act directed on itself may
surprise us, we are going to analyze the chosen example more
closely.
It should be observed first of all that the choice of total
ends although totally free is not necessarily nor even frequent-
ly made in joy. We must not confuse our necessity of
choosing with the will to power. The choice can be effected
in resignation or uneasiness; it can be a flight; it can be
realized in bad faith. We can choose ourselves as fleeing,
inapprehensible, as indecisive, etc. We can even choose not
to choose ourselves. In these various instances, ends are
posited beyond a factual situation, and the responsibility for
these ends falls on us. Whatever our being may be, it is a
choice; and it depends on us to choose ourselves as “great”
or “noble” or “base” and “humiliated.” If we have chosen
humiliation as the very stuff of our being, we shall realize
ourselves as humiliated, embittered, inferior, etc. We are
not dealing here with givens with no further meaning.
But the man who realizes himself as humiliated thereby
constitutes himself as a means of attaining certain ends: the
humiliation chosen can be, for example, identified like mas-
ochism with an instrument designed to free us from existence-
for-itself; it can be a project of getting rid of our anguishing
freedom to the advantage of others; our project can be to
cause our being-for-itself to be entirely absorbed by our
being-for-others. At all events the “inferiority complex” can
arise only if it is founded on a free apprehension of our
being-for-others. This being-for-others as a situation will
act in the capacity of a cause, but all the same it must
be discovered by a motive which is nothing but our free
project. Thus the inferiority which is felt and lived is the
chosen instrument to make us comparable to a thing; that
608
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
is, to make us exist as a pure outside in the midst of the
world. But it is evident that it must be lived in accordance
with the nature which we confer on it by this choice — i.e.,
in shame, anger, and bitterness. Thus to choose inferiority
does not mean to be sweetly contented with an aurea
mediocritas; it is to produce and to assume the rebellion and
despair which constitute the revelation of this inferiority.
For example, I can persist in manifesting myself in a certain
kind of employment because I am inferior in it, whereas
in some other field I could without difficulty show myself
equal to the average. It is this fruitless effort which I have
chosen, simply because it is fruitless — either because I prefer
to be the last rather than to be lost in the mass or because
I have chosen discouragement and shame as the best means
of attaining being.
It is obvious, however, that I can choose as a field of
action the province in which I am inferior only if this choice
implies the reflective will to be superior there. To choose to
be an inferior artist is of necessity to wish to be a great artist;
otherwise the inferiority would be neither suffered nor recog-
nized. To choose to be a modest artisan in no way implies
the pursuit of inferiority; it is a simple example of the choice
of finitude. On the contrary, the choice of inferiority implies
the constant realization of a gap between the end pursued by
the will and the end obtained. The artist who wishes to be
great and who chooses to be inferior intentionally maintains
this gap; he is like Penelope and destroys by night what he
makes by day. Thus with his artistic realizations he maintains
himself constantly on the voluntary level and hence displays a
desperate energy. But, this very will is in bad faith; that is,
-it flees the recognition' of the true ends chosen by the- spon-
taneous consciousness, and it constitutes false psychic objects
as motives in order to be able to deliberate concerning these
motives and to determine itself in terms of them (the
love of glory, the love of the beautiful, etc.). The will here
is by no means opposed to the fundamental choice; quite the
contrary it is understood in its end and in its fundamental bad
faith only within the perspective of a fundamental choice of in-
feriority. Whereas in the form of reflective consciousness the
will constitutes in bad faith false psychic objects as motives, on
the other hand in the capacity of a non-reflective and non-
thetic self-consciousnessi it is consciousness (of) being in
bad faith and consequently (of) the fundamental project
609
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
pursued by the for-itself. Thus the divorce between the
spontaneous and willed consciousness is not a purely estab-
lished factual given. On the contrary this duality is projected
and initially realized by our fundamental freedom; it is con-
ceived only in and through the profound unity of our funda-
mental project, which is to choose ourselves as inferior. But
precisely, this divorce implies that the voluntary deliberation
decides in bad faith to offset or to hide our inferiority by
means of works whose inner goal is actually to enable _ us
on the contrary to measure this inferiority.
Thus, as is seen, our analysis enables us to accept the
two levels on which Adler places the inferiority complex:
like him we admit a fundamental recognition of this inferi-
ority, and like him we admit a heavy and ill-balanced develop-
ment of acts, words, and statements designed to offset
or to hide this deep feeling. But there are these differ-
ences: (1) We do not allow ourselves to conceive of the
fundamental recognition as unconscious; it is so far from
being unconscious that it even constitutes the bad faith of
the will. Due to this fact we do not establish between the
two levels considered the difference between the uncon-
scious and the conscious, but rather that which separates the
fundamental unreflective consciousness and its tributary, the
consciousness reflected-on. (2) It seems to us that the con-
cept of bad faith — as we established in Part One — should
replace those of the censor, repression, and the uncon-
scious which Adler uses. (3) The unity of the consciousness
such as it is revealed to the cogito is too profound for us
to admit a division into two levels unless the unity is re-
covered by a more profound synthetic intention leading froih
one level to the other and unifying them. Consequently
we feel that there is something of deeper significance than
the inferiority complex itself; not only is the inferiority
complex recognized, but this recognition is a choice. Not
only does the will seek to hide this inferiority by means
of shifting and feeble affirmations; a more profound inten-
tion traverses it and chooses precisely the feebleness and
shiftiness of these affirmations with the intention of ren-
dering more noticeable this inferiority which we claim to
flee and which we shall experience in shame and in the feeling
of failure. Thus the man who suffers from Minderwertigkeit
has chosen to be his own tormentor. He has chosen shame
and suffering, which does not mean, however, that he is to
610
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
experience any joy when they are most forcefully realized.
But if these new possibles are chosen in bad faith by a
will which is produced within the limits of our initial proj-
ect, they must nevertheless be realized to a certain extent
against the initial project. To the extent that we wish
to hide our inferiority from ourselves precisely in order
to create it, we can wish to overcome the timidity and the
stuttering which on the spontaneous level manifest our
initial project of inferiority. We shall then undertake a
systematic and reflective effort to cause these manifestations
to disappear. We make this attempt in the state of mind
of patients who come to consult the^ psychoanalyst. That is,
on the one hand we work for an achievement which on the
other hand we refuse. Thus the patient decides voluntarily to
come to consult the psychoanalyst in order to be cured of
certain troubles which he can no longer hide, from himself;
and by the mere fact that he puts himself in the hands of
the physician he runs the risk of being cured. But on
the other hand, if he runs this risk, it is in order to persuade
himself that he has in vain done everything possible in order to
be cured and that therefore he is incurable. Hence he ap-
proaches the psychoanalytic treatment with bad faith and bad
will. All his efforts will have as their goal causing the attempt
to fail although he voluntarily continues to lend himself
to the enterprise. Similarly the psychasthenics whom Janet
studied suffer from an obsession which they intentionally
enter into and wish to be cured of. But, to be precise,
their will to be cured has for its goal the confirmation
of these obsessions as sufferings and consequently the reali-
zation of them in all their strength. We know the result:
the patient can not confess his obsessions; he lies sobbing
on the floor, but he does not determine himself to make the
requisite confession. It would be useless to speak here of a
struggle between the will and the disease; these processes
unfold within the ekstatic unity of bad faith in a being
who is what he is not and who is not what he is. Similarly
when the psychoanalyst is close to grasping the initial proj-
ect ^ of the patient, the latter abandons the treatment ' or
begins to lie. It would be useless to try to explain this resis-
tance by a revolt or an unconscious anxiety. How then could
the unconscious be informed of the progress of the psy-
choanalytical investigation unless precisely by being a con-
sciousness? But if the patient plays the game to the end.
611
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
it is necessary that he experience a partial cure; that is,
there must be produced in him the disappearance of the
morbid phenomena which have brought him to seek the
help of the physician. Thus he will have chosen the lesser
evil: having come in order to persuade himself that he
is incurable, he is forced — ^in order to avoid apprehending
his project in full light and consequently having to nihilate
it and to become freely another project — he is forced to
depart in full possession of the cure. Similarly the methods
which I shall employ to cure myself of stuttering and of
timi dity may have been attempted in bad faith. Nonetheless
the fact remains that I have been forced to recognize their
efiS-cacy. In this case the timidity and the stuttering will
disappear; it is the lesser evil. An artificial and voluble
assurance will come to replace them. But it is the same with
these cures as it is with the cure of hysteria by electric shock
treatment. We know that this therapy can effect the disappear-
ance of an hysterical contraction of the leg, but as one will
see, some time later the contraction will appear in the arm.
This is because the hysteria can be cured only as a totality,
for it is a total project of the for-itself. Partial medications
only succeed in displacing the manifestations. Thus the cure
of the timidity or of the stuttering is consented to and
chosen in a project which extends to the appearance of
other troubles — for example, to the realization of a foolish
and equally unbalanced self-assurance.
Since the upsurge of a voluntary decision finds its motive
in the fundamental free choice of my ends, it can attack
these ends in appearance only. It is therefore only within
the compass of my fundamental project that the will can
be efficacious; and I can be “freed” from my “inferiority
complex” only by a radical modification of my project which
could in no way find its causes and its motives in the prior
project, not even in the suffering and shame which I
experience, for the latter are designed expressly to realize
my project of inferiority. Thus so long as I am “in”
the inferiority complex, I can not even conceive of the possi-
bUity of getting out of it. Even if I dream of getting out
of it, the precise function of this dream is to make me experi-
ence even further the abjection of my state; it can be inter-
preted therefore only in and through the intention which
makes me inferior. Yet at each moment I apprehend this
mitial choice as contingent and unjustifiable; at each mo-
612
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ment therefore I am on the site suddenly to consider it
objectively and consequently to surpass it and to make-
it-past by causing the liberating instant to arise. Hence my
anguish, the fear which I have of being suddenly exor-
cized (i.e., of becoming radically other); but hence also
the frequent upsurge of “conversions” which cause me totally
to metamorphose my original project These conversions,
which have not been studied by philosophers, have often in-
spired novelists.*- One may recall the instant at which Gide’s
Philoctetes casts off his hate, his fundamental project, his
reason for being, and his being. One may recall the instant
when Raskolnikoff decides to give himself up. These extra-
ordinary and marvelous instants when the prior project col-
lapses into the past in the light of a new project which rises
on its ruins and which as yet exists only in outline, in which
humiliation, anguish, joy, hope are delicately blended, in
which we let go in order to grasp and grasp in order to let
go — these have often appeared to furnish the clearest and
most moving image of our freedom. But they are only one
among others of its many manifestations.
Thus presented, the “paradox" of the inefficacy of
voluntary decisions will appear less offensive. It amounts
to saying that by means of the will, we can construct our-
selves entirely, but that the will which presides over this
construction finds its meaning in the original project which
it can appear to deny, that consequently this construction
has a function wholly different from that which it advertises,
and that finally it can reach only details of structures and
will never modify the original project from which it has
issued any more than the consequences of a theorem can
turn back against it and change it.
At the end of this long discussion, it seems that we
have succeeded in making a little more precise our onto-
logical understanding of freedom. It will be well at present
to gather together and summarize the various results ob-
tained.
(1) A first glance at human reality informs us that for it
being is reduced to doing. The psychologists of the nineteenth
century who pointed out the “motor" structures of drives,
of the^ attention, of perception, etc., were right. But motion
itself is an act. Thus we find no given in human reality in
V Tr. Sartre seems not to have read or to have forgotten William JameSi
The Varieiies of Religious Experience^
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 613
the sense that temperament, character, passions, principles
of reason would be acquired or innate data existing in the
manner of things. The empirical consideration of the human
being shows him as an organized unity of conduct patterns
or of “behaviors.” To be ambitious, cowardly, or irritable
is simply to conduct oneself in this or that manner in this
or that circumstance. The Behaviorists were right in con-
sidering that the sole positive psychological study ought to
be of conduct in strictly defined situations. Just as the
work of Janet and the Gestalt school have put us in a posi-
tion to discover types of emotional conduct, so we ought to
speak of types of perceptive conduct since perception is never
conceived outside an attitude with respect to the world.
Even the disinterested attitude of the scientist, as Heidegger
has shown, is the assumption of a disinterested position
with regard to the object and consequently one conduct among
others. Thus human reality does not exist first in order to
act later; but for human reality, to be is to act, and to cease
to act is to cease to be.
(2) But if human reality is action, this means evidently
that its determination to action is itself action. If we reject
this principle, and if we admit that human reality can
be determined to action by a prior state of the world of of
itself, this amounts to putting a given at the beginning of
the series. Then these acts disappear as acts in order to
give place to a series of movements. Thus the notion of con-
duct is itself destroyed with Janet and with the Behavior-
ists. The existence of the act implies its autonomy.
(3) Furthermore, if the act is not pure motion, it must
be defined by an intention. No matter how this intention
is considered, it can be only a surpassing of the given toward
a result to be obtained. This given, in fact, since it is pure
presence, can not get out of itself. Precisely because it is,
it is fully and solely what it is. Therefore it can not provide
the reason for a phenomenon which derives all its meaning
from a result to be attained; that is, from a non-existent
When the psychologists, for example, view the drive as a
factual^ state, they do not see that they are removing from
It all its character as an appetite (ad-petitio) . In fact, if
the sexual drive can be differentiated from the desire
to sleep, for example, this can be only by means of its end,
and this end does not exist. Psychologists ought to have
asked what could be the ontological structure of a phenomenon
614 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
such that it makes known to itself what it is by means of
something which does not yet exist. The intention, which
is the fundamental structure of human-reality, can in no case
be explained by a given, not even if it is presented as an
emanation from a given. But if one wishes to interpret the
intention by its end, care must be taken not to confer on
this end an existence as a given. In fact if we could admit
that the end is given prior to the result to be attained it
would then be necessary to concede to this end a sort
of being-in-itself at the heart of its nothingness and an
attractive virtue of a truly magical type. Moreover we should
not succeed any better in understanding the connection
between a given human reality and a given end than in
understanding the connection between consciousness-substance
and reality-substance in the realists’ arguments. If the
drive or the act is to be interpreted by its end, this is because
the intention has for its structure positing its end outside
itself. Thus the intention makes itself be by choosing the
end which makes it known.
(4) Since the intention is a choice of the end and since
the world reveals itself across our conduct, it is the intentional
choice of the end which reveals the world, and the world
is revealed as this or that (in this or that order) according
to the end chosen. The end, illunoinating the world, is a
state of the world to be obtained and not yet existing. The
intention is a thetic consciousness of the end. But it can
be so only by making itself a non-thetic consciousness of its
own possibility. Thus my end can be a good meal if I am
hungry. But this meal which beyond the dusty road on which
I am traveling is projected as the meaning of this road (it
goes toward a hotel where the table is set, where the
dishes are prepared, where I am expected, etc.) can be
apprehended only correlatively with my non-thetic project
toward my own possibility of eating this meal. Thus by a
double but unitary upsurge the intention illuminates the
world in terms of an end not yet existing and is itself defined
by the choice of its possible. My end is a certain objective
state of the world, my possible is a certain structure of my
subjectivity; the one is revealed to the thetic consciousness,
the other flows back over the non-thetic consciousness in
order to characterize it.
(5) If the given can not explain the intention, it is neces-
sary that the intention by its very upsurge realize a rupture
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 615,
with the given, whatever this may be. Such must be the case,
for otherwise we should have a present plenitude succeeding
in continuity" a present plenitude, and we could not pre-
figure the future. Moreover, this rupture is necessary for
the appreciation of the given. The given, in fact, could
never be a cause for an action if it were not appreciated.
But this appreciation can be realized only by a withdrawal
in relation to the given, a putting of the given into paren-
theses, which exactly supposes a break in continuity. In
addition, the appreciation, if it is not to be gratuitous, must
be effected in the light of something. And this something
which serves to appreciate the given can be only the end.
Thus the intention by a single unitary upsurge posits the
end, chooses itself, and appreciates the given in terms of
the end. Under these conditions the given is appreciated in
terms of something which does not yet exist; it is in the
light of non-being that being-in-itself is illuminated. There
results a double nihilating coloration of the given: on the
one hand, it is nihilated in that the rupture makes it lose
all efficacy over the intention; on the other hand, it under-
goes a new nihilation due to the fact that efficacy is returned
to itjn terms of a nothingness appreciation. Since human
reality is act, it can be conceived only as being at its core
a rupture with the given. It is the being which causes there
to be a given by breaking with it and illuminating it in the
light of the not-yet-existing.
(6) The necessity on the part of the given to appear only
within the compass of a nihilation which reveals it is actu-
ally the same as the internal negation which we de-
scribed in Part Two. It would be in vain to imagine that
consciousness can exist without a given; in that case it
would be consciousness (of) itself as consciousness of
nothing — that is, absolute nothingness. But if .consciousness
exists in terms of the given, this does not mean that the
given conditions consciousness; consciousness is a pure and
simple negation of the given, and it exists as the disengage-
ment from a certain existing given and as an engagement
toward a certain not yet existing end. But in addition this in-
ternal negation can be only the fact of a being which is in per-
petu^ withdrawal in relation to itself. If this being were
not Its own negation, it would be what it is — i.e., a pure
and simple given. Due to this fact it would have no connec-
tion with any other datum since the given is by nature
616
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
only what it is. Thus any possibility of the appearance of
a world would be excluded. In order not to be a given, the
for-itself must perpetually constitute itself as. in withdrawal
in relation to itself; that is, it must leave itself behind it
as a datum which it already no longer is. This character-
istic of the for-itself implies that it is the being which finds
no help, no pillar of support in what it was. But on the
other hand, the for-itself is free and can cause there to
be a world because the for-itself is the being which has to
be what it was in the light of what it will be. Therefore the
freedom of the for-itself appears as its being. But since
this freedom is neither a given nor a property, it can
be only by choosing itself. The freedom of the for-itself is
always engaged; there is no question here of a freedom
which could be undetermined and which would pre-exist
its choice. We shall never apprehend ourselves except as a
choice in the making. But freedom is simply the fact that
this choice is always unconditioned.
(7) Such a choice made without base of support and
dictating its own causes to itself, can very well appear absurd,
and in fact it is absurd. This is because freedom is a
choice of its being but not the foundation of its being. We
shall return to this relation between freedom and facticity
in the course of this chapter. For the moment it will suffice
us to say that human-reality can choose itself as it intends
but is not able not to choose itself. It can not even refuse to
be; suicide, in fact, is a choice and affirmation — of being.
By this being which is given to it, human reality partici-
pates in the universal contingency of being and thereby in
what we may call absurdity. This choice is absurd, not be-
cause it is without reason but because there has never been
any possibility of not choosing oneself. Whatever the choice
may be, it is founded and reapprehended by being, for it is
choice which w.-But what must be noted here is that this
choice is not absurd in the sense in which in a rational
universe a phenomenon might arise which would not be
bound to others by any reasons. It is absurd in this sense—
that the choice is that by which all foundations and all rea-
sons come into being, that by which the very notion of the
absurd receives a meaning. It is absurd as being beyond all
reasons. Thus freedom is not pure and simple contingency
in so far as it turns back toward its being in order to illumi-
nate its being in the light of its end. It is the perpetual escape
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 617
from contingency; it is the interiorization, the nihilatwn,
and the subjectivizing of contingency, which thus modified
passes wholly into the gratuity of the choice.
(8) The free project is fundamental, for it is my bemg.
Neither ambition nor the passion to be loved nor the ittferi-
ority complex can be considered as fundamental projects.
On the contrary, they of necessity must be understood in
terms of a primary project which is recognized as the project
which can no longer be interpreted in terms of any other
and which is total. A special phenomenological method will
be necessary in order to make this initial project explicit. This
is what we shall call existential psychoanalysis. We shall
speak of this in the next chapter. For the present we can
say that the fundamental project which I am is a project
concerning not my relations with this or that particular
object in the world, but my total being-in-the-world; since
the world itself is. revealed only in the light of an end, this
project posits for its end a certain type of relation to
being which the for-itself wills to adopt. This project is not
instantaneous, for it can not be “in” time. Neither is it
non-temporal in order to “give time to itself” afterwards.
That is why we reject Kant’s “choice of intelligible character.”
The structure of the choice necessarily implies that it be a,
choice in the world. A choice which would be a choice in
terms of nothing, a choice against nothing, would be a choice
of nothing and would be annihilated as choice. There is, only
phenomenal choice, provided that we understand that the
phenomenon is here the absolute. But in its very upsurge,
&e choice is temporalized since it causes a future to come to
illuminate the present and to constitute it as a present by
giving the meaning of pastness to the in-itself “data.” How-
ever we need not understand by this that the fundamental
project is co-extensive with the entire “life” of the for-itself.
Since freedom is a being-without-support and without-a-
springboard, the project in order to be must be constantly
renewed, I choose myself perpetually and can never be
merely by virtue of having-been-chosen; otherwise I should
tall into the pure and simple existence of the in-itself. The
necessity of perpetually choosing myself is one with the
pursued-pursuit which I am. But precisely because here we
are dealing with a choice, this choice as it is made indicates
in general other choices as possibles. The possibility of these
tner choices is neither made explicit nor posited, but -it is
618 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
lived in the feeling of unjustifiability; and it is this which
is expressed by the fact of the absurdity of my choice
and consequently of my being. Thus my freedom eats away
my freedom. Since I am free, I project my total possible, but
I thereby posit that I am free and that I can always nihilate
this first project and make it past
Thus at the moment at which the for-itself thinks to
apprehend itself and make known to itself by a projected
nothingness what it is, it escapes itself; for it thereby posits
that it can be other than it is. It will be enough for it to
make explicit its unjustifiability in order to cause the instant
to arise; that is, the appearance of a new project on the col-
lapse of the former. Nevertheless this upsurge of the new
project has for its express condition the nihilation of the for-
mer, and hence the for-itself can not confer on itself a new
existence. As soon as it rejects the project which has lapsed
into the past, it has to be this project in the form of the “was”;
this means that this lapsed project belongs henceforth to the
for-itself’s situation. No law of being can assign an a priori
number to the different projects which I am. The existence
of the for-itself in fact conditions its essence. But it is
necessary to consult each man’s history in order to get from it
a particular idea with regard to each individual for-itself.
Our particular projects, aimed at the realization in the world
of a particular end, are united in the global project which
we ’are. But precisely because we are wholly choice and act,
these partial projects are not determined by ^e global project
They must themselves be choices; and a certain margin of
contingency, of unpredictability, 'and of the absurd is
allowed to each of them although each project as it is pro-
jected is the specification of the global project on the occa-
sion of particular elements in the situation and so is always
understood in relation to the totality of my being-in-the-
world.
With these few observations we think that we have de-
scribed the freedom of the for-itself in its original existence.
But it will have been observed that this freedom requires
a given, not as its condition but for other sound reasons.
First, freedom is conceived only as the nihilation of a
given (5); and to the extent that it is an internal negation
and a consciousness, it participates (6) in the necessity which
prescribes that consciousness be consciousness of something.
In addition freedom is the freedom of choosing but not
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 619
the freedom of not choosing. Not to choose is, in fact, to
choose not to choose. The result is that the choice is the
foundation of being-chosen but not the foundation of choos-
ing. Hence the absurdity (7) of freedom. There again we
are referred to a given which is none other than the very
facticity of the for-itself. Finally the global project while
illuminating the world in its totality can be made specific
on the occasion of this or that element of the situation and
consequently of the contingency of the world. All these
remarks therefore refer us to a difficult problem: that
of the relation of freedom to facticity. Moreover we shall
inevitably meet other concrete objections. Can I choose to
be tall if I am short? To have two arms if I have only one?
Etc. These depend on the “limitations” which my Factual
situation would impose on my free choice of myself. It will
be well therefore to examine the other aspect of freedom,
its “reverse side”; its relation to facticity.
n. FREEDOM AND FACTICITY: THE
' SITUATION
The decisive argument which is employed by common sense
against freedom consists in reminding us of our impotence.
Far from being able to modify our situation at our whim, we
seem to be unable to change ourselves. I am not “free” either
to escape the lot of my class, of my nation, of my family, or
even to build up my own power or my fortune or to
conquer my most insignificant appetites or habits. I am born a
worker, a Frenchman, an hereditary syphilitic, or a tubercular.
The history of a life, whatever it may be, is the history of a
failure. 'The coefficient of adversity of things is such that years
of patience are necessary to obtain the feeblest result. Again
it is necessary “to obey nature in order to command it”; that
is, to insert my action into the network of determinism. Much
more than he appears “to make himself,” man seems “to be
made” by climate and the earth, race and class, language,
the history of the collectivity of which he is a part, heredity,
the individual circumstances of his childhood, acquired
ha^s, the great and small events of his life.
This argument has never greatly troubled the partisans of
Descartes, first of all, recognized bo
tne will IS infinite and that it is necessary “
620 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ourselves rather than fortune.” Here certain distinctions
ought to be made. Many of the facts set forth by the deter-
minists do not actually deserve to enter, into our considera-
tions. In particular the coefficient of adversity in things can
not be an argument against our freedom, for it is by us—
i.e., by the preliminary positing of an end — that this coeffi-
cient of adversity arises. A particular crag, which manifests a
profound resistance if I wish to displace it, will be on the
contrary a valuable aid if I want to climb upon it in order to
look over the countryside. In itself — if one can even imagine
what the crag can be in itself — it is neutral; that is, it waits to
be illuminated by an end in order to manifest itself as adverse
or helpful. Again it can manifest itself in one or the other way
only within an instrumental-complex which is already es-
tablished. Without picks and piolets, paths already worn,
and a technique of climbing, the crag would be neither easy
nor difficult to climb; the question would not be posited, it
would not support any relation of any kind with the technique
of mountain climbing. Thus although brute things (what
Heidegger calls “brute existents”) can from the start limit
our freedom of action, it is our freedom itself which must first
constitute the framework, the technique, and the ends in
relation to which they will manifest themselves as limits. Even
if the crag is revealed as “too difficult to climb,” and if we
must give up the ascent, let us note that the crag is revealed
as such only because it was originally grasped as “climba-
ble”; it is therefore our freedom which constitutes the limits
which it will subsequently encounter.
Of course, even after all these observations, there remains
an unnamable and unthinkable residuum which belongs to the
in-itself considered and which is responsible for the fact that
in a world illuminated by our freedom, this particular crag
will be more favorable for scaling and that one not. But this
residue is far from being originally a limit for freedom; in
fact, it is thanks to this residue — ^that is, to the brute in-
itself as such — that freedom arises as freedom. Indeed
common sense will agree with us that the being who is said
to be free is the one who can realize his projects. But in order
for the act to be able to allow a realization, the simple projec-
tion of a possible end must be distinguished a priori from the
realization of this end. If conceiving is enough for realizing,
then I am plunged in a world like that of a dream in which
the possible is no longer in any way distinguished from the real.
'being and DOING: FREEDOM 621
I am condemned henceforth to see the world modified at
whim of the changes of my consciousness; ! can not practice
in relation to my conception the “putting into brackets and
the suspension of judgment which will distinguish a simple
fiction from a real choice. If the object appears as soon as it
is simply conceived, it will no longer be chosen or merely
wished for. Once the distinction between the simple wish,
the representation which I could choose, and the choice is
abolished, freedom disappears too. We are free when the final
term by which we make known to ourselves what we are is
an end; that is, not a real existent like that which in the-
supposition which we have made could fulfill our wish, but
an object which does not yet exist. But consequenfiy this end
can be transcendent only if it is separated from us at the same
time that it is accessible. Only an ensemble of real existents
can separate us from this end — ^in the same way that this end
can be conceived only as a state to-come of the real existents
which separate me from it. It is nothing but the outline of an
order of existents — ^that is, a series of dispositions to be
assumed by existents on the foundation of their actual rela-
tions. By the internal negation, in fact, the for-itself illumi-
nates the existents in their mutual relations by means of the
end which it posits, and it projects this end in terms of the
determination which it apprehends in the existent. There
is no circle, as we have seen, for the upsurge of the for-itself
is efiected at one stroke. But if this is the case, then the very
order of the existents is indispensable to freedom itself. It is
by means of them that freedom is separated from and re-
united to the end which it pursues and which makes known
to it what it is. Consequently the resistance which freedom
reveals in the existent, far from being a danger to freedom,
results only in enabling it to arise as freedom. There can be a
free for-itself only as engaged in a resisting world. Outside of
this engagement the notions of freedom, of determinism, of
necessity lose all meaning.
^ necessary to point out to “common sense”
that.&e formula “to be free” does not mean “to obtain what
one has wished” but rather “by oneself to determine oneself to
choosing). In other words
nnnnc^ iniportant to freedom. The discussion which
pMosophers stems here from a
“freedom” popular concept of
om which has been produced by historical, polifical.
622
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
and moral circumstances is equivalent to "the ability to obtain
the ends chosen.” The technical and philosophical concept of
freedom, the only one which we are considering here, means
only the autonomy of choice. It is necessary, however, to note
that the choice, being identical with acting, supposes a
commencement of realization in order that the choice may be
distinguished from the dream and the wish. Thus we shall not
say that a prisoner is always free to go out of prison, which
would be absurd, nor that he is always free to long for release,
which would be an irrelevant truism, but that he is always
free to try to escape (or get himself liberated); that is, that
whatever his condition may be, he can project his escape and
learn the value of his project by undertaking some action. Our
description of freedom, since it does not distinguish between
choosing and doing, compels us to abandon at once the dis-
tinction between the intention and the act. The intention can
no more be separated from the act than thought can be
separated from the language which expresses it; and as it
happens that our speech informs us of our thought, so our
acts will inform us of our intentions — that is, it will enable
us to disengage our intentions, to schematize them, and to
make objects of them instead of limiting us to living them —
i.e., to assume a non-thetic consciousness of them. This essen-
tial distinction between the jfreedom of choice and the free-
dom of obtaining was certainly perceived by Descartes, follow-
ing Stoicism. It puts an end to all arguments based on the
distinction between “willing” and “being able,” which are
still put forth today by the partisans and the opponents of
freedom.
It is nonetheless true that freedom encounters or seems to
encounter limitations on account of the given which it sur-
passes or nihilates. To show that the coefficient of adversity of
the thing and its character as an obstacle (joined to its charac-
ter as an instrument) is indispensable to the existence of a
freedom is to use an argument that cuts two ways; for while it
enables us to establish that freedom is not invalidated by the
given, it indicates, on the other hand, something like an
ontological conditioning of freedom. Would it not be reason-
able to say, along with certain contemporary philosophers: if
no obstacle, then no freedom? And as we can not admit that
freedom by itself creates its own obstacle — ^which would be
absurd for anyone who has understood the meaning of'
spontaneity — there seems to be here a kind of ontological
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
623
priority'of the in-itself over the for-itself. Therefore we must
consider the previous remarks as simple attempts to clear &e
ground, and we must take up again from the begmmng the
^^We°ha4^^itaSshed that the for-itself is free. But this
does not mean that it is its own foundation. If to be free
meant to be its own foundation, it would be necessary that
freedom should decide the existence of its being. And this
necessity can be understood in two ways. First it would be
necessary that freedom should decide its being-free, that is,
not only that it should be a choice of an end, but that it
diould be a choice of itself as freedom. This would suppose
therefore that the possibility of being-free and the possibility
of not-being-free exist equally before the free choice of
either one of them — i.e., before the free choice of freedom.
But since then a previous freedom would be necessary which
would choose to be free — Le., basically, which would
choose to be what it is already — vfQ should be referred
to infinity; for there would be need of another prior freedom
in order to choose this and so on. In fact we are a freedom
which chooses, but we do not choose to be free. We are con-
demned to freedom, as we said earlier, thrown into freedom
or, as Heidegger says, “abandoned.” And we can see that this
abandonment has no other origin than the very existence of
freedom. If, therefore, freedom is defined as the escape from
the given, from fact, then there is a fact of escape from fact.
This is the facticity of freedom.
But the fact that freedom is not its own foundation can
be understood also in another way which will lead to identi-
cal conclusions. Actually if freedom decided the existence of
its being, it would be necessary not only that my being not-
free should be possible, but necessary as well that my abso-
lute non-existence be possible. In other words, we have seen
that in the initial project of freedom the end turns back upon
causes in order to constitute them as such; but if freedom is
to be its own foundation, then the end must in addition turn
back on its existence and cause it to arise. We can see what
woifid result from this: the for-itself would itself derive from
which it proposes to
existence made legitimate by means of its end
« ^^^ence by right but not in fact. And it is true that
624
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
is one which consists in trying to make itself recognized by
the Other as an existence by right. We insist on our indi-
vidual rights only within the compass of a vast project which
would tend to confer existence on us in terms of the function
which we fulfill. This is the reason why man -tries so often to -
identify himself with his function and seeks to see in himself
only the “Presiding Judge of the Court of Appeal,” the “Chief
Treasurer and Paymaster,” etc. Each of these functions has its
existence justified by its end. To be identified with one of
them is to take one’s own existence as saved from contin-
gency. But these efforts to escape original contingency succeed
only in better establishing the existence of this contingency.
Freedom can not determine its existence by the end which it
posits. Of course it exists only by the choice which it makes
of an end, but it is not master of the fact that there is a free-
dom which makes known to itself what it is by means of its
end. A freedom which would produce its own existence
would lose its very meaning as freedom. Actually freedom is
not a simple undetermined power. If it were, it would be
nothingness or in-itself; and it is only by an aberrant synthe-
sis of the in-itself and nothingness that one is able to con-
ceive of freedom as a bare power pre-existing its choices. It
determines itself by its very upsurge as a “doing.” But as we
have seen, to do supposes the nihilation of a given. One does
something with or to something. Thus freedom is a lack of
being in relation to a given being; it is not the upsurge of a
full being. And if it is this hole in being, this nothingness of
being as we have just said, it supposes all being in order to
rise up in the heart of being as a hole. Therefore it could not
determine its existence from the standpoint of nothingness,
for all production from the standpoint of nothingness can
be only being-in-itself.
We have proved elsewhere in Part One of this work that
nothingness can appear nowhere except at the heart of
being. Here we add also the demands of common sense:
empirically we can be free only in relation to a state of things
and in spite of this state of things. I will be said to be free in
relation to this state of things when it does not constrain
me. Thus the empirical and practical concept of freedom is
wholly negative; it issues from the consideration of a situation
and establishes that this situation leaves me free to pursue this
or that end. One might say even that this situation conditions
my freedom in this sense, that the situation is there in order
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM ' 625
not to constrain me. Remove the prohibition to circle m
the streets after -the curfew, and what meanmg ^an there be
for me to have the freedom (which, for example, has been
conferred on me by a pass) to take a walk at night/
Thus freedom is a lesser being which supposes ^
order to elude it. It is not free not to exist or not to be free.
We are going to grasp immediately the connection of these
two structures. In- fact, as freedom is the escape from being,
it could not produce itself laterally alongside being and in a
project of “surveying”; one can not escape from a gaol in
which one is not imprisoned. A projection of the self on the
margin of being can in no way constitute itself as the nihila-
tion of this being. Freedom is the escape from an engage-
ment in being; it is the nihilation of a being which it is. This
does not mean that human-reality exists first, to be free sub-
sequently. “Subsequently” and “first” are terms created by
freedom itself. The upsurge of freedom is effected by
the double nihilation of the being which it is and of
the being in the midst of which it is. Naturally free-
dom is not this being in the sense of being-in-itself. But by
freedom’s illuminating insufficiencies in the light of the end
chosen, there is this being which is its own. Freedom has to be
behind itself this being which it has hot chosen; and precisely
to the extent that it turns back upon it in order to illuminate
it, freedom causes this being which is its own to appear in
relation with the plenum of being — that is, to exist in the
midst of the world. We said that freedom is not free not to be
free and that it is not free not to exist. This is because the
fact of not being able not to be free is the facticity of free-
dom, and the fact of not being able not to exist is its contin-
gency. Contingency and facticity are really one; there is a
bemg which freedom has to be in the form of non-being
(that is, of nihilation). To exist as the fact of freedom or to
have to be a being in the midst of the world are one and the
same thing, and this means that freedom is originally a rela-
tion^ to the given.
But what is this relation to the given? Are we to
fretdoSM ’f ’ in-itsel£) conditions
freedom Tbe given does not cause
thrm, 1 , V reason” comes into the world
freedom “ i' necessary condition of
freedom smce we are on the level of pure contingency.
626 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Neither is it an indispensable matter on which freedom must
exercise itself, for this would be to suppose that freedom exists
ready-made as an Aristotelian form or as a Stoic Pneuma and
that it looks for a matter to work in. The given in no way
enters into the constitution of freedom since freedom is interi-
orized as the internal negation of the given. It is simply the
pure contingency which freedom exerts by denying the given
while making itself a choice; the given is the plenitude of
being which freedom colors with insufBciency and with neg-
atite by illuminating it with the light of an end which does not
exist. The given is freedom itself in so far as freedom exists;
and whatever it does, freedom can not escape its existence.
The reader will have understood that this given is nothing
other than the in-itself nihilated by the for-itself which has
to be it, that the body as a point of view on the world, that
the past as the essence which the for-itself was — that these
are three designations for a single reality. By its nihUating
withdrawal, freedom causes a whole system of relations to be
established, from the point of view of the end, between all
in-itselfs; that is, between the plenum of being which is re-
vealed then as the world and the being which it has to be in
the midst of this plenum and which is revealed as one being,
as one “this” which it has to be.
Thus by its very projection toward an end, freedom con-
stitutes as a being in the midst of the world a particular
datum which it has to be. . Freedom does not choose it, for
this would be to choose its own existence; but by the choice
which it makes of its end, freedom causes ‘ the datum
to be revealed in this or that way, in this or that light in
connection with the revelation of the world itself. Thus
the very contingency of freedom and the world which sur-
rounds this contingency with its own contingency will appear
to freedom only in the light of the end which it has
chosen; that is, not as brute existents but in the unity of the
illumination of a single nihilation. And freedom would
never be able to reapprehend this ensemble as a pure datum,
for m that case it would be necessary that this freedom be
outside of all choice and therefore that it should cease
to be freedom. We shall use the term situation for the
contingency of freedom in the plenum of being of the
world inasmuch as this datum, which is there only in order
not to conrfram freedom, is revealed to this freedom only
as already illuminated by the end which' freedom chooses.
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
627
Thus the datum never appears to the for-itself as a brute
existent, in-itself; it is discovered always as a cause since
it is revealed only in the light of an end which illuminates
it. Situation and motivation are really one. The for-itself dis-
covers itself as engaged in being, hemmed in by being,
threatened by being; it discovers the state of things which
surrounds it as the cause for a reaction of defense or attack.
But it can make this discovery only because it freely posits
the end in relation to which the state of things is threatening
or favorable.
These observations should show us that the situation,
the common product of the contingency of the in-itself and
of freedom, is an ambiguous phenomenon in which it is
impossible for the for-itself to distinguish the contribution
of freedom fromuhat of the brute existent. In fact, just as
freedom is the esrape from a contingency which it has to be
in order to escape it, .so the situation is the free coordination
and the free qualification of a brute given which does not
allow itself to be qualified in any way at all. Here I am at
the foot of this crag which appears to me as “not scalable.”
This means that the rock appears to me in the light of a
projected scaling — a secondary project which finds its mean-
ing in terms of an initial project which is my being-in-the-
world. Thus the rock is carved out on the ground of the
world by the effect of the initial choice of my freedom. But
on the other hand, what my freedom can not determine is
whether the rock “to be scaled” will or will not lend itself
to scaling. This is part of the brute being of the rock. Never-
theless the rock can show its resistance to the scaling only
if the rock is integrated by freedom in a “situation” of
which the general theme is scaling. For the simple traveler
who passes over this road and whose free project is a pure
aesthetic ordering of the landscape, the crag is not revealed
.either as scalable or as not-scalable; it is manifested only
as beautiful or ugly.
Thus it is impossible to determine in each particular case
what comes from freedom and what comes from the brute be-
ing of the for-itself. The given in-itself as resistance or as aid
is revealed only in the light of the projecting freedom. But
the projecting freedom organizes an illumination such that
the in-itself is revealed by it as it is (i.e., resisting or favor-
able); but we must clearly understand that the resistance
of the given is not directly admissible as an in-itself quai-
628 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ity of the given but only as an indication — across a free
illumination and a free refraction — of an inapprehensible
quid. Therefore it is only in and through the free upsurge of
a freedom that the world develops and reveals the resistance
which can render the projected end unrealizable. Man
encounters an obstacle only within the field of his freedom.
Better yet, it is impossible to decree a priori what comes
from the brute existent and what from freedom in the char-
acter of this or that particular existent functioning as an
obstacle. What is an obstacle for me may not be so for
another. There is no obstacle in an absolute sense, but the
obstacle reveals its coefficient of adversity across freely invent-
ed and freely acquired techniques. The obstacle reveals this
efficient also in terms of the value of the e^nd posited by free-
dom. The rock will not be an obstacle if I, wish at any cost to
arrive at the top of the mountain, ^n the other hand,
it will discourage me if I have freely/, fixed limits to my desire
of making the projected climb. TTaus the world by coeffi-
cients of adversity reveals to me the way in which I stand in
relation to the ends which I assign myself, so that I can
never know if it is giving me information about myself
or about it. Furthermore the coefficient of adversity of the
given is never a simple relation to my freedom as a pure nihi-
lating thrust. It is a relation, illuminated by freedom, between
the datum which is the cliff and the datum which my
freedom has to be; that is, between the contingent which
it is not and its pure facticity. If the desire to scale it is
equal, the rock will be easy for one athletic climber but
difficult for another, a novice, who is not well trained
and who has a weak body. But the body in turn is revealed ^
as well or poorly trained only in relation to a free choice. It
is because I am there and because I have made of myself
what I am that the rock develops in relation to my body
a coefficient of adversity. For the lawyer who has remained
in the city and who is pleading a case, whose body is hidden
under his lawyer’s robe, the rock is neither hard nor easy
to climb; it is dissolved in the totality “world” without in
any way emerging from it. And in one sense it is I who
choose my body as weak by making it face the difficulties
wnich I cause to be born (mountain climbing, cycling, sport).
If I have not chosen to take part in sports, if I live in the
city, and if I concern myself exclusively with business or
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 629
intellectual work, then from this point of view my body will
have no quality whatsoever.
Thus we begin to catch a glimpse of the paradox of free-
dom: there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a
situation only through freedom. Human-reality everywhere
encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not created,
but these resistances and obstacles have meaning only
in and through the free choice which human-reality is.
But in order better to grasp the meaning of these remarks and
to derive the advantages which they allow, it wUl be well
at present to analyze in the light of them certain specific
examples. What we have called the facticity of freedom is
the given which it has to be and which it illuminates by its
project. This given is manifested in several ways although
within the absolute unity of a single illumination. It is
my place, my body, my past, my position in so far as
it is already determined by the indications of Others, finally
my fundamental relation to the Other. We are going to
examine successively as with specific examples these various
structures of the situation. But we must never lose sight of
the fact that no one of them is given alone and that when we
consider one of them in isolation, we are restricted to making
it appear on the synthetic ground of the others.
A. My Place
My place is defined by the spatial order and by the particular
nature of the “thises” which are revealed to me on the
ground of the world. It is naturally the spot in which I
“live” (my “country” with its sun, its climate, its resources,
its hydrographic and orographic configuration). It is also
more simply the arrangement and the order of the objects
which at present appear to me (a table, beyond the table a
window, to the left of the window a cabinet, to the right
a chair, and beyond the window the street and the sea),
which indicate me as the reason for their order. It is not
possible for me not to have a place; otherwise my relation
to the world would be a state of survey, and the world would
no longer be manifested to me in any way at all — as we have
seen earlier. Moreover, although this actual place can have
been assigned to me by my freedom (I have “come” here),
I have been able to occupy it only in connection with that
which I occupied previously and by following paths marked
630 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
out by the objects themselves. This previous place refers
me to another, this to another, and so on to the pure contin-
gency of my place; that is, to that place of mine which no
longer refers to anything else which is a part of my experi-
ence: the place which is assigned to me by my birth.
It would be useless to explain this last place by the one
which my mother occupied when she brought me into the
- world. The chain is broken, the places freely chosen by my
parents would be invalid as an explanation of my places.
If one considers any one of them in its connection with my
original place — as when one says, for example, “I was born
at Bordeaux because my father was given a position there as
a civU servant,” or “I was bom at Tours because ray grand-
parents had property there and my mother took refuge near
them when during her pregnancy she learned of my father’s
death” — ^this merely shows more clearly how for me birth
and the place which it assigns me are contingent things.
Thus to be bora is, among other characteristics, to take one's
place, or rather according to what we have just said, to
receive it. And as this original place will be that in terms
of which I shall occupy new places according to deter-
mined rules, it seems that we have here a strong restriction
of my freedom. Moreover as soon as one reflects on it, the
question is seen to be exceedingly complicated. The parti-
sans of free-will point out that along with any place present-
ly occupied, an infinity of other places is offered to my choice.
The opponents of freedom insist on the fact that an
infinity of places is denied me by the fact that objects turn
toward me a face which I have not chosen and which is
exclusive of all others; they add that my place is too pro-
foundly bound up with other conditions of my existence
(my dietary habits, climate, etc.) not to contribute to making
me. Between the partisans and opponents of freedom a
decision seems impossible. This is because the debate has
not been placed on its true level.
If we wish to posit the question as it should be, we must
proceed from this antinomy: human-reality originally receives
its place in the midst of things; human-reality is that by
which something we can call place comes to things. Without
human-reality there would have been neither space nor
place, and yet this human-reality by which placing comes
to things comes to receive its- place among things without
having any say in the matter. In truth there is no mystery
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 631
here, but the description must proceed from the antinomy;
for it is this which will give to us the exact relation between
freedom and facticity.
We have seen that geometrical space — i.e., the pure reci-
procity of spatial relations — ^is a pure nothingness. The only
concrete placing which can be revealed to me is absolute
extension — i.e., thatrWhich is defined by my place considered
as the center for which distances are accounted for absolute-
ly, with me as object and without reciprocity. The only
absolute extension is that which unfolds starting from a
location which I am absolutely. No other point could be
chosen as an absolute center of reference without being
immediately involved in universal relativity. If there is an
extension within the limits of which I shall apprehend my-
self as free or as not-free, an extension which will be
presented to me as helpful or as adverse (separating), -this
can be only because before all else I exist my place without
choice, without necessity either, as the pure absolute fact of
my being-there. I am there, not here but there. This is
the absolute and incomprehensible fact which is at the
origin of extension and consequently of my original relations
with things (with these things rather than with those), A
fact of pure contingency — an absurd fact.
Yet on the other hand, this place which I am is a rela-
tion. A univocal relation, to be sure, but a relation all the
same. If I am limited to existing my place, I can not at the
same time be elsewhere in order to establish this fundamental
relation; I can not have even a dim comprehension of the
object in relation to which my place is defined. I can only
exist the inward determinations which the inapprehensible
and unthinkable objects which surround me without my
knowing it can provoke in me. By the same token the very
reality of absolute extension disappears, and I am separated
from everything which resembles a place. Furthermore I am
neither free nor not-free; I am a pure existent without
constraint, but without any way either of denying the con-
straint. In order that such a thing as an extension originally
defined as my place may come into the world and by the same
stroke strictly define me, it is not merely necessary that I
exist my place — i.e., that / have to be there. It is necessary
as well that I be able to be not wholly here so that I can be
over there, near the object which I locate at ten feet from
me and from the standpoint of which I make my place
632
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
known to myself. The univocal relation which defines my
place functions in fact as a relation between something
which I am and something which I am not. This relation
in order to be revealed must be established. It supposes there-
fore that I am in a position to effect the following operations:
(1) I must be able to escape what 1 am and to nihilate it
in such a way that what I am, although it is existed, can
still be revealed as the term of a relation. This relation is
immediately given. It is not, however, given in the simple
contemplation of objects (if we tried to derive space from
pure contemplation, one could well object, for objects are
given with absolute dimensions, not with absolute distances).
It is given rather in our contemplating our immediate action
(“He is coming toward us,” “Let’s avoid him,” “I am
running after him,” etc.). It implies as such a comprehension
of what I am as being-there. But at the same time it is very
necessary to define what I am from the standpoint of the
being-there of other “thises.” I am as being-there the one
toward whom someone comes running, the one who has
still an hour to climb before being at the top of the moun-
tain, etc. Therefore when I look at the mountain top, for
example, we are dealing with an escape from myself accom-
panied by a reflux which I effect in terms of the summit of
the mountain toward my being-there in order to situate
myself. Thus I must be “what I have to be” by the very fact
of escaping it. In order for me to be defined by my place,
it is necessary first that I escape myself in order to proceed
to posit the co-ordinates in terms of which I shall define
myself more narrowly as the center of the world. It should
be noted that my being-there can in no way determine the
surpassing which is going to fix and to locate things since
my being-there is a ' pure given, incapable of projecting
and since, moreover, in order to be defined strictly as this
or that being-there, it is already necessary that it has been
determined by the surpassing followed by the reflux.
(2) I must be able by an internal negation to escape
the “thises” — in the midst of — the world which I am not
and by which 1 make known to myself what 1 am. To dis-
cover them and to escape them is the result, as we have seen,
of a single negation. Here again the internal negation is
first and spontaneous in relation to the datum as discov-
ered. We can not admit that the datum provokes our appre-
hension; on the contrary, in order that there may be a “this”
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
633
which announces its distances to the Being-there which I
am, it is necessary for me to escape it by di pure negation.,
Nihilation, internal negation, a determining turning back
upon the being-there which I am — these three operations
are really one. They are only moments of an original tran-
scendence which launches toward an end by nihilating me so
that I may make known to myself what I am by means
of the future. Thus it is my freedom which comes to confer
on my place and to define it as such by situating me. The
sole reason that I can be strictly limited to this being-there
which I am is that my ontologicd structure is not to be what
I am and to be what I am not.
Furthermore this determination of placing, which pre-
supposes all transcendence, can occur only in relation to an
end. It is in the light of an end that my place takes on its
meaning. For I could never be simply there. My place is
grasped as an exile or, on the contrary, as that natural, re-
assuring and favored location which Mauriac called querencia,
comparing it to the place to which the wounded bull always
returns in the arena. In relation to what I project doing, in
relation to the world in totality and hence to my being-in-
the-world, my place appears to me as an aid or a hindrance.
To be in place is to be far from or near to — -^that
is, place is provided with a meaning in relation to a certain
not-yet-existing being which one wants to attain. It is
the accessibility or the inaccessibility of this end which
defines place. It is therefore in the light of not-being and
of the future ,that my position can be actually understood.
“To be there” is to have to take just one step in order to
reach the teapot, to be able to dip the pen in the mk by
stretching my arm, to have to turn my back to the window
if I want to read without tiring my eyes, to have to ride my
bicycle and to put up with the fatigue of a hot afternoon for
two hours if I wish to see my friend Pierre, to take the train
and pass a sleepless night if I want to see Annie.
For a Colonial, “to be there” is to be twenty days away from
France; better yet, if he is a civil servant and is waiting for
a trip at government expense, it is to be six months and
seven days from Bordeaux or from Etaples. For a soldier,
“to be there” is to be a hundred and ten, a hundred and
twenty days from his discharge. The future — a projected
future — intervenes everywhere; it is my future life at Bor-
deaux, at Etaples, the future discharge of the soldier, the future
634
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
word which I shall write with a pen wet with ink — it is all this
which means my place to me and which makes me exist with
nervousness or impatience or nostalgia. On the other hand,
if I am fleeing from a group of men or from public opinion,
then my place is defined by the time which would be neces-
sary for these people to discover me at the far end of the
village where I am lodging, for them to arrive at this village,
etc. In this case the isolation is what makes my place known
to me as favorable. Here to be in place is to be sheltered.
This choice of my end slips into even purely spatial rela-
tions (high and low, right and left, etc.) so as to give them
an existential meaning. The mountain is “overwhelming” if I
live at the foot of it; on the other hand, if I am at its peak,
the mountain is recovered by the very project of my pride and
symbolizes the superiority which I attribute to myself over
other men. The place of rivers, the distance from the sea,
etc., come into play and are provided with symbolic meaning;
constituted in the light of my end, my place reminds me
symbolically of this end in all its details as in its ensemble
connections. We shall return to this point when we want to
defime more exactly the object and the method of existential
psychoanalysis. The brute relation of distance to objects can
never be allowed to get its meaning and symbols from out-
side, for these are our very way of constituting it. Even more
this brute relation itself has meaning only in relation to the
choice of techniques which allow distances to be measured
and to be traversed. A particular city situated twenty miles
from my village and connected with it by a streetcar is much
nearer to me than a rocky peak situated four miles away but
-at an altitude of two thousand eight hundred meters. Heideg-
ger has shown how daily concerns assign to instruments a
place which has nothing in common with pure geometric dis-
tance; my glasses, he says, once they are on my nose, are
much farther from me than the object which I see through
them.
Thus it must be said that the facticity of my place is re-
vealed to me only in and through the free choice which I
make of my end. Freedom is indispensable to the discovery of
my facticity. I learn of this facticity from all the points of the
future which I project; it is from the standpoint of this
chosen future that facticity appears to me with its character-
istics of impotence, of contingency, of weakness, of absurdity.
It is in. relation to my dream of seeing New York that it is
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
635
absurd and painful for me to live at Mont-de-Marsan. But
conversely facticity is the only reality which freedom can
discover, the only one which it can nihilate by the positing of
an end, the only thing in terms of which it is meaningful to
posit an end. For if the end can illuminate the situation, this
is because the end is constituted as a projected modification
of this situation. My place appears in terms of the changes
which I project. But to change implies something to be
changed, which is precisely my place. Thus freedom is the
apprehension of my facticity. It would be absolutely useless
to seek to define or to describe the “quid” of this facticity
“before” freedom turns back upon it in order to apprehend
it as a determined deficiency. My place, before freedom has
circumscribed my placing as a lack of a certain kind, “is”
not, strictly speakmg, anything at all since the very extension
in terms of which all place is understood does not exist. On
the other hand, the question itself is unintelligible, for it.
involves “before” which has no meaning; it is freedom,- in
fact, which temporalizes itself along the lines of a “before”
and “after.” Nevertheless the fact remains that this brute and
unthinkable “quid” is that without which freedom could not
be freedom. It is the very facticity of my freedom.
It is only in the act by which freedom has revealed factic-
ity and apprehended it as place that this place thus defined
is manifested as an impediment to my desires, an obstacle, etc.
Otherwise how could it possibly be an obstacle? An obstacle
to what? A' compulsion to do what? The story i^s told of an
emigrant who was going to leave France for Argentina after
the failure of his political party: When someone remarked to
him that Argentina was “very far away,” he asked, “Far from
what?” And it is very certain that if Argentina appears “far
away” to those who live in France, it is so in relation to an
implicit national project which valorizes their place as French.
For the internationalist revolutionary, Argentina is a center
of the world as is any other country. But if we have by a pri-
mary project first constituted French territory as our absolute
place, and if some catastrophe forces us to go into exile, it is
in relation to this initial project that Argentina will appear
to us as “very far away,” as a “land of exile”; it is in relation
fo this project that we shall feel ourselves expatriated.
Thus our freedom itself creates the obstacles from which
we suffer. It is freedom itself which, by positing its end and by
choosing this end as inaccessible or accessible with difficulty.
636
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
causes our placing to appear to our projects_as an insurmount-
able resistance or a resistance to be surmounted with difficulty.
It is freedom again which establishes the spatial connections
between objects as the first type of a relation of instrumental-
ity, which decides on techniques permitting distances to be
measured and cleared, and thus constitutes its own restriction.
But to be precise, freedom can exist only as restricted since
freedom is choice. Every choice, as we shall see, supposes
elimination and selection; every choice is a choice of finitude.
Thus freedom can be truly free only by constituting facticity
as its own restriction. It would therefore be to no point to
say that I am not free to go to New York because of the
fact that I am a minor government official at Mont-de-
Marsan. On the contrary, it is in relation to my proj-
ect of going to New York that I am going to situate myself
at Mont-de-Marsan. My placing in the world, the relation
of Mont-de-Marsan to New York and to China would be
altogether different if, for example, my project were to become
a wealthy farmer at Mont-de-Marsan. In the first case Mont-
de-Marsan appears on the ground of a world which maintains
an organized connection with New York, Melbourne, and
Shanghai; in the second it emerges on the ground of an un-
differentiated world. As for the real importance of my proj-
ect of going to New York, I alone decide it. It can be just
a way of choosing myself as discontented with Mont-de-Mar-
san; and in this case everything is centered on Mont-de-
Marsan; I simply make proof of the need of perpetually
nihilating my place, of living in a perpetual withdrawal in
relation to the city which I inhabit. It' can also be a project
in which I wholly engage myself. In the first case I shall
apprehend my place as an insurmountable obstacle and I shall
have simply used an indirect means to define it indirectly in
the world. In the second case, on the other hand, the obstacles
will no longer exist; my place will be no longer a point of
attachment but a point of departure, for in order to go to New
York, some point of departure is necessary. Thus I shall
apprehend myself at any moment 'whatsoever as engaged in
the world at my contingent place. But it is precisely this
engagement which gives meaning to my contingent place and
which is my freedom. To be sure, in being born 1 take a place,
but I am responsible for the place which I take. We can see
clearly here the inextricable connection of freedom and factic-
ity in the situation. Without facticity freedom would not
BEING AND DOING; FREEDOM
637 '
exist — ^as a power of nihilation and of choice — and without
freedom f acticity would not be discovered and would have no
meaning.
B. My Past
We have a past. Of course we have been able to establish that
this past does not determine our acts as a prior phenomenon
determines a consequent phenomenon; we have shown that
the past is without force to constitute the present and to
sketch out the future. Nevertheless the fact remains that the
freedom which escapes toward the future can not give itself
any past it likes according to its fancy; there are even more
compelling reasons for the fact that it can not produce itself
without a past. It has to be its own past, and this past is
irremediable. It even seems at first glance that freedom can
not modify its past in -any way; the past is that which is out
of reach and which haunts us at a distance' without our even
being able to turn back to face it in order to consider it. If
the past does not determine our actions, at least it is such that
we can not take a new decision except in terms of it. If I
have been trained at a naval academy, and if I have become
an officer in the Navy, at each moment that I assume myself
and consider myself, I am engaged; at the very instant when I
apprehend myself, I am on watch on the bridge of the ship of
which I am second in command. I can suddenly revolt
against this fact, hand in my resignation, decide on suicide.
These extreme measures are taken in connection with the past
which is mine; if they aim at destroying it, this is because
my past exists, and my most radical decisions can succeed only
in taking a negative position with respect to my past. But
basically this is to recognize the past’s immense importance
as a backdrop and a point of view. Every action designed to
wrench me away from my past must first be conceived in terms
of my particular past; that is, the action must before all rec-
ognize that it is bom out of the particular past which it
wishes .to destroy. Our acts, says the proverb, follow after us.
, The p^t is present and melts insensibly into the present; it is
the suit of clothes which I selected six months ago, the house
which I have had built, the book which I began last winter,
my wife, the promises which I have made to her, my children;
all which I am I have to be in the mode of having-been.
638
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Thus the importance of the past can not be exaggerated
since for me “Wesen ist was gewesen ist,” essence is what has
been. But we find here the paradox pointed out previously:
I can not conceive of myself without a past; better yet, I can
no longer think anything about myself since I think about
what I am and since I am in the past; but on the other hand I
am the being through whom the past comes to myself and to
the world.
Let us examine this paradox more closely. Since freedom
is choice, it is change. It is defined by the end which it pro-
jects; that is, by the future which it has to be. But precisely
because the future is the not-yet-existing-state of what is, it
can be conceived only within a narrow connection with
what is. It is not possible that what is should illuminate what
is not yet, for what is is a lack and consequently can be
known as such only in terms of that which it lacks. The end
illuminates what is. But to go looking for the end to-come in
order by means of it to make known that-which-is, requires
being dready beyond what-is in a nihilating withdrawal
which makes what-is appear clearly in the state of an isolated-
system. What-is; therefore, takes on its meaning only when it
is surpassed toward the future. Therefore what-is is the past
We see how the past as “that which is to be changed” is in-
dispensable to the choice of the future and how consequently
no free surpassing can be effected except in terms of a past
but we can see too how the very nature of the past comes to
the past from the original choice of a future. In particular the
irremediable quality of the past comes from my actual choice
of the future; if the past is that in terms of which I conceive
and project a new state of things in the future, then the past
itself is that which is left in place, that which consequently is
itself outside all perspective of change. Thus in order for the
future to be realizable, it is necessary that the past be ir-
remediable.
It is possible for me not to exist; but if I exist, I can not
lack having a past. Such is the form which is assumed here by
the “necessity of my contingency.” But on the other hand,
as we have seen, two existential characteristics in particular
qualify the For-itself :
, (1) Nothing is in consciousness which— is not conscious-
ness of being.
(2) In 'my being, my being is in question. This means
that nothing comes to me which is not chosen.
-BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
639
We have seen, indeed, that a Past which was only Past
would collapse in an honorary existence in which it would
have lost all connection with the present. In order for us to
“have” a past, it is necessary that we maintain it in existence
by our very project toward the future; we do not receive our
past, but the necessity of our contingency implies that we are
not able not to choose it. This is what it means “to have to be
one’s own past.” We see that this necessity, considered here
from a purely temporal point of view, is not basically distinct
from the primary structure of freedom, which must be the
nihilation of the being which it is and which, by this very
nihilation, brings it about that there is a. being which it is.
But while freedom is the choice of an end in terms of the
past, conversely the past is what it is only in relation to the
end chosen. TTiere is an unchangeable element in the past
{e.g., I had whooping cough when I was five years old) and
an element which is eminently variable (the meaning of the
brute fact in relation to the totality of my being). But since,
on the other hand, the meaning of the past fact penetrates it
through and through (I can not “recall” my childhood whoop-
ing cough outside of a precise project which defines its mean-
ing), it is finally impossible for me to distinguish the un-'
changeable brute existence from the variable meanbg which
it includes. To say “I had whooping cough when I was four
years old”^^ supposes a thousand projects, in particular the
adoption of the calendar as a system of reference for my
individual existence (hence the adoption of an original posi-
tion with regard to the social order) and a confident belief
in the accounts which third persons give of my childhood,' a
belief which certainly goes along with a respect or an affec-
tion for my parents, a respect which shapes its meaning for
me, etc. That brute fact itself is, but apart from the witness of
others, its date, the technical name of the illness (an ensemble
of meanings which depend on my projects) what can it be?
Thus this brute existence, although necessarily existent and
unchangeable, stands as the ideal end — beyond reach — of a
systematic specification of all the meanings included in a
memory. There is, of course, a “pure matter” of memory in
the sense in which Bergson speaks of pure memory; but when
Tr. Sartre’s uncertainty as to just when he had whooping cough seems
to imply even more shiftiness on the part of the past than his philosophy
jusUfiesI
640 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
it shows itself, it is always in and through a project which
includes the appearance of this matter in its purity.
Now the meaning of the past is strictly dependent on my
present project. This certainly does not mean that I can
make the meaning of my previous acts vary in any way I
please; quite the contrary, it means that the fundamental proj-
ect which I am decides absolutely the meaning which the past
which I have to be can have for me and for others. I alone in
fact can decide at each moment the bearing of the past. I do
not decide it by debating it, by deliberating over it, and in
each instance evaluating the importance of this or that prior
event; but by projecting myself toward my ends, I preserve
the past with me, and by action I decide its meaning. Who
shall decide whether that mystic crisis in my fifteenth year
“was” a pure accident of puberty or, on the contrary, the first
sign of a future conversion? I myself, according to whether
I shall decide — at twenty years of age, at thirty years — to be
converted. The project of conversion by a single stroke con-
fers on an adolescent crisis the value of a premonition which
I had not taken seriously. Who shall decide whether the
period which I spent in prison after a theft was fruitful or
deplorable? I — according to whether I give up stealing or be--
come hardened. Who can decide the educational value of a
trip, the sincerity of a profession of love, the purity of a past
intention, etc.? It is I, always I, according to the ends
by which I illuminate these past events.
Thus all my past is there pressing, urgent, imperious, but
its meanings and the orders which it gives me I choose by the
very project of my end. Of course the engagements which I
have undertaken weigh upon me. Of course the marriage I
made earlier, the house I bought and furnished last year limit
my possibilities and dictate my conduct; but precisely because
my projects are such- 1 reassume the marriage contract. In
other words, precisely because I do not make of it a “mar-
riage Contract which is past, surpassed, dead” and because, on
the contrary, my projects imply fidelity to the engagements
undertaken or the decision to have an “honorable life” as a
husband and a father, etc., these projects necessarily come to
illuminate the past marriage vow and to confer bn it its
always actual value. Thus the urgency of the past comes from
the future.
Suppose that in the manner of Schlumberger’s hero’-^ I
Schlumberger. Un homme heureux. Paris: Gallimard.
641
- - BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
radically modify my fundamental project, that I seek, for
example, to tree myself from a continued state of happiness,
and my earlier engagements will lose all their urgency. They
will no longer be here except as the towers and ramparts of
the Middle Ages are here, structures which one can not deny
but which have no other meaning than that of recalling -a
stage previously traversed, a civilization and a period of
political and economic existence which today are surpassed
and perfectly dead. It is the future which decides whether the
past is living or dead. The past, in fact, is originally a proj-
ect, as the actual upsurge of my being. And to the same
extent that it is a project, it is an anticipation; its meaning
comes to it from the future which it sketches in outline.
When the past slips wholly into the past, its absolute value
depends on the validation or invalidation of the anticipations
which it was. But it depends on my actual freedom to confirm
the meaning of these anticipations by again accepting re-
sponsibility for them — i.e., by anticipating the future which
they anticipated — or to invalidate them by simply anticipating
another future. In this case the past falls back as a disarmed
and duped expectation; it is “without force.” This is because
the only force of the past comes to it from the future; no
matter how I live or evaluate my past, I can do so only in the
light of a project of myself toward the future. ,
Thus the order of my choices of the future is going to
determine an order of my past, and this order will contain
nothing of the chronological. There will be first the always
living past which is always confirmed: my promise of love,
certain business contracts, a certain picture of myself to
which I am faithful. Then there is the ambiguous past
which has ceased to please me and to which I still hold in-
directly: for example, this suit which I am wearing, and
which I bought at a certain period when I had the desire to
be fashionable, displeases me extremely at present; hence the
past in which I “chose” the suit is truly dead. But on the
other hand, my actual project of economy is such that I must
continue to wear this suit rather than get another. Hence it
belongs to a past which is both dead and living like those
social institutions - which, having been created for a deter- -
mined end, have now outlived the regime which established
them and have been -made to serve altogether different ends,
sometimes even opposed ends. A living past, a half-dead past,
survivals, ambiguities, discrepancies: the ensemble of these
642 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
layers of pastness is organized by the unity of my .project It is
by means of this project that diere is installed the complex
system of references which causes any fragment of my past to
enter into an hierarchical, plurivalent organization in which,
as in a work of art, each partial structure indicates in differ-
ent ways, various other partial structures and the total struc-
ture.
Furthermore this decision with respect to the value, the
order, and the nature of our past is simply the historical
choice m general. If human societies are historical, this does
not stem simply from the fact that they have a past but from
the fact that they reassume the past by making it a memorial.
When American capitalism decides to enter the European
war of 1914-1918 because it sees there the opportumty
for profitable transaction, it is not historical; it is only
utilitarian. But when in the light of its utilitarian projects,
it recovers the previous relations of the United States with
France and gives to them the meaning of the paying of a
debt of honor by Americans to France, then it becomes
historical. In particular it makes itself historical by the famous
sentence: “Lafayette, we are here!” It goes without saying &at
if a different view of her real interests had led the United
States to place itself on the side of Germany, she would not
have lacked past elements to recover on the memorial
level. One can imagine, for example, propaganda based on
“blood kinship,” which chiefly would have taken into account
the proportion of Germans in the emigration to America in
the nineteenth century. It would be in vain to try to view
these references to .the past as purely publicity enterprises;
actually the essential fact is that they are necessary in order
to gain the adherence of the masses and that therefore the
masses demand a political project which illuminates and
justifies their past. Moreover, it is evident that the past is
thus created. There has been in this way the construction
of a common French-American past which, on the one
hand, signified the great economic interests of the Americans
and, on the other hand, the actual aflSnities of two democrat-
ic capitalisms. Similarly about 1938 we saw how a new
generation, concerned with the international events which
were in preparation, now suddenly illuminated the period
of 1918-1938 with a new light by calling it “the period
between the wars” even before war actually had btirst forth
in 1939. Suddenly the period under consideration (1918-
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
643
1938) was constituted in a form which was limited, surpassed,
and repudiated whereas those who had lived through it by
projecting themselves toward a future in continuity with
their present and their immediate past had experienced
it as the start of a continuous and unlimited progress. The
actual project therefore decides whether a defined period
of the past is in continuity with the present or whether it
is a discontinuous fragment from which one is emerging and
which is put at a distance.
Thus human history would have to be finished before a
particular event, for example the taking of the Bastille,
could receive a definitive meaning. Nobody denies, of
course, that the Bastille was taken in 1789; there is the
immutable fact. But are we to see in this event a revolt
without consequence, a popular outburst against a half-dis-
mantled fortress, an event which the Convention, anxious
to create a famous past of itself, was able to transform into
a glorious deed? Or should we consider it as the first mani-
festation of popular strength by which the populace asserted
itself, gave itself confidence, and put itself in a position to
effect the- march on Versailles in those “Last Days of Octo-
ber”? He who would like to decide the question today
forgets that the historian is himself historical; that is, that
he historicizes himself by illuminating “history” in the
light of his projects and of those of his society. Thus it
is necessary to say that the meaning of the social past is
perpetually “in suspense.”
Now exactly like societies, the human person has a me-
morial past in suspense. It is this perpetual putting into ques-
tion of the past which the sages realized very early and which
the Greek tragedians expressed, for example, by that
proverb which appears in all their plays: “No man can be
called happy before his death.” The perpetual historization
of the For-itself is the perpetual affirmation of its freedom.
Once this fact is established, it is not necessary to hold that
&e past’s character as “in suspense” appears to the For-itself
in the form of a vague or incomplete aspect of its prior his-
tory.^ On the contrary, quite as much as the choice of the
For-itself, which in its own way it expresses, the Past is
apprehended by the For-itself each moment as strictly defined.
Similarly the Arch of Titus or the Column of Trajan, what-
ever may be the historical evolution of their meaning else-
where, appear to the Roman or the tourist who considers
644
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
them, as realities perfectly mdividualized. In the light of the
project which illuminates it, the Past is revealed as perfectly
compelling. The suspended character of the Past is in no way
miraculous; it only serves to express — on the level of making-
past and of the in-itself — ^the projective and expectant aspect
which human reality had before turning to the past. It is
because this human-reality was a free project eaten away by
an unpredictable freedom that it becomes “in the past” a
tributary of the further projects of the For-itself. Human-real-
ity is condemned to make-itself-past and hence to wait forever
for the confirmation which it expected from the future. Thus
the past is indefinitely in suspense because human-reality
“was” and “will be” perpetually expecting. Expectation and
suspense only succeed in affirming still more plainly that
freedom is their original constituent. To say that the past
of the For-itself is in suspense, to say that its present is an
expecting, to say that its future is a free project, or that
it can be nothing without having to be it, or that it is a
totality-detotalized — all these are one and the same thing.
But this does not imply any indetermination in my past as it is
revealed to me at present; it means simply that the right of
my actual revelation of my past to be definitive is put into
question. But just as my present is an expectation of a con-
firmation or of an invalidation which nothing allows it to fore-
see, so the past, which is involved in this expectation, is precise
to the same extent that the expectation is precise. But the
meaning of the past, although strictly individualized, is totally
dependent on this expectation which itself depends on an
absolute nothingness; that is, on a free project which does
not yet exist My past therefore is a concrete and precise
proposition which as such awaits ratification. This is cer-
tainly one of the meanings which Kafka’s The Trial tries
to bring to light, the characteristic in human reality of being
perpetually in court. To be free is to have one’s freedom
perpetually on trial. The result is that the past while con-
fined within my actual free choice is — once this choice has
determined it — ^an integral and necessary condition of my
project
example may make this point clearer. The past of a
retired soldier under the Restoration is to have been a hero
of the retreat from Russia. And what we have explained
just now enables us to understand that this past itself is a
free choice of the future. It is by choosing not to join
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM -
645
in with the government of Louis XVin and the new customs,
by choosing until the end to hope for the triumphal return
of the Emperor, by choosing even to conspire to hasten this
return and to prefer to be a retired soldier rather than an
active soldier that the old soldier of Napoleon chooses for
himself a past as a hero of Berezina. Another soldier who
had formed the project of going over to the new govern-
ment would certainly not have chosen the same past. But
conversely, if we are considering only one retired soldier,
if he lives in almost indecent poverty, if he is embittered,
and if he longs for the Emperor’s return, this is because he
was a hero of the retreat from Russia. We must be sure to
understand this: the past does not act before any constituting
recovery, and it does not in any way act deterministically;
but once the past “soldier of the Empire” has been chosen,
then the conduct of the for-itseif realizes this past. There is
even no difference between the soldier’s choosing this past
and his realizing it by his behavior. Thus the for-itself, by
endeavoring to make of its past glory an intersubjective
reality, constitutes it in the eyes of others as being an
objectivity-for-others (the reactions of the officials, for
example, to the danger represented by these old soldiers).
Treated as such by others, the soldier acts henceforth in such
a way as to render himself worthy of a past which he has
chosen in order to compensate for his present misery and
failure. He shows himself intransigent, he loses every chance
of a pension; this is because he “can not” be unworthy of
his past.
Thus we choose our past in the light of a certain end, but
from then on it imposes itself upon us and devours us. This
is not because this past has an existence by itself different
from that which we have to be but simply because: (1) it
is the actually revealed materialization of the end which we
are; (2) it appears in the midst of the world for us and for
others, is never alone but sinks into the universal past
and thereby offers itself to the evaluation of others. Just as
the geometrician is free to create a particular figure which
pleases him but can not conceive of one which does not
immediately enter an infinity of relations with the infinity
of other possible figures, so our free choice of ourselves
by causing the upsurge of a certain evaluative order of
our past, causes the appearance in the world of an infinity
of relations of this past to the word and to the Other. And
646 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
this infinity of relations is presented to us as an infinity of
conducts to be adopted since it is in the future that we
evaluate our past. We are compelled to adopt these conducts
in so far as our past appears within the compass of our
essential project. To will this project, in fact, is to will the
past; and to will this past is to will to realize it by a thou-
sand secondary behaviors. Logically the requirements of the
past are hypothetical imperatives: “If you wish to have such
and such a past, act in such and such a way.” But as the
first term is a concrete and categorical choice, the imperative
also is transformed into a categorical imperative.
But since the force of compulsion in my past is borrowed
from my free, reflecting choice and from the very power
which this choice has given itself, it is impossible to deter-
mine a priori the compelling power of a past. It is not only
its content and the order of this content which my free
choice decides; it is also the adherence of my past to my
actuality. If within a fundamental perspective which we
do not yet have to determine, one of my principal projects
is to progress — i.e., to be always at any cost a little further
advanced along a certain path than I was yesterday or an
hour earlier, this progressive project involves in relation to
my past a series of “uprootings.” The past — which now from
the height of my progress I regard with a slightly scornful
pity — is that which is strictly a passive object for moral
evaluation and judgment. “How stupid 1 was then!” or
“How wicked I was!” It exists only because I can dissociate
myself from it. I no longer enter into it, nor do I any
longer wish to enter into it. This is not, of course, because
it ceases to exist, but it exists only as that self which I no
longer am — i.e., that being which I have to be as the self
which I am no longer. Its function is to be what I have
chosen of myself in order to oppose myself to it, that which
enables me to measure myself. Such a for-itself chooses itself
therefore without solidarity with itself, which means not
that it abolishes its past but that it posits its past so as not
to be associated with it, exactly so as to aflflrm its total free-
dom (that which is past is a certain kind of engagement with
respect to the past and a certain kind of tradition). On the
other hand, there are other for-itselfs whose project implies
the rejection of time and a narrow solidarity with the past.
In their desire to find a solid ground these latter have, by
contrast, chosen the past as that which they are, everything
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
647
else being only an indefinite and unworthy flight from tradi-
tion. They have chosen at the start the refusal of flight;
that is, the refusal to refuse. The past consequently has
the function of requiring of them a fidelity. Thus we shall
see that the former persons admit scornfully and easily to a
mistake which they have made whereas the very admission
will be impossible for the others without their deliberately
changing their fundamental project; the latter will then em-
ploy all the bad faith in the world and all the subterfuges which
they can invent in -order to avoid breaking that faith in
“what is” which constitutes an essential structure of their
project.
Thus like place, the past is integrated with the situation
when the for-itself by its choice of the future confers on its
past facticity a value, an hierarchical order, and an urgency in
terms of which this facticity motivates the act and conduct
of the for-itself.
C. My Environment
My “environment” must not be confused with the place
which I occupy and which we have already discussed. My
'environment is made up of the instrumental-things which
surround me, including their peculiar coefficients of adver-
sity and utility. Of course in occupying my place, I prepare
the ground for the revelation of my environment, and by
changing place — an operation, which, as we have seen, I freely
realize — provide the basis for the appearance of a new
environment. But on the other hand the environment can
change or be changed by others without my having any hand
in the change. To be sure, Bergson has shown in Matter and
Memory that a single modification of my place involves the
total change of my environment while it would be necessary
to imagine a total and simultaneous modification of all my
environment in order to be able to speak of a modification
of my place. Now this global change of the environment is
inconceivable, but the fact remains that my field of action is
perpetually traversed by the appearances and disappearances
of objects with which I have nothing to do. In a general
way the coefficient of adversity and utility of complexes does
not depend solely on my place, but on the particular
potentiality of the instruments. Thus as soon as I exist I
648 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
am thrown into the midst of existences different from me
which develop their potentialities around me, for and against
me. For example, I wish to arrive on my bicycle as quickly
as possible at the next town. This project involves my personal
ends, the appreciation of my place and of the distance from
my place to the town, and the free adaptation of means
(efforts) to the end pursued. But I have a flat tire, the sun
is too hot, the wind is blowing against me, etc., all phenom-
ena which I had not foreseen: these are the environment.
Of course they manifest themselves in and through my prin-
cipal project; it is through the project that the wind can
appear as a headwind or as a “good” wind, through the
project that the sun is revealed as a propitious or an incon-
venient warmth. The synthetic organization of these per-
petual “accidents” constitutes the unity of what the Germans
call my Umwelt, and this Umwelt can be revealed only
within the limits of a free project — i.e., of the choice of
the ends which I am.
If our description stopped here, however, it would be
much too simple. If it is true that each object in my surround-
ings is made known in a situation already revealed and that
the sum of these objects can not by itself alone constitute a
situation, if it is true that each instrument is raised on the
ground of a situation in the world, still the fact remains that
the abrupt transformation or the abrupt appearance of another
instrument can contribute to a radical change in the situation.
Let my the be punctured, and my distance from the next
town suddenly changes; now it is a distance to be counted by
steps and not by the revolutions of the wheels. From this
fact I can acquire the certainty that the person whom I wish
to see will have already taken the train when I arrive at his
house, and this certainty can involve other decisions on my
part (a return to my point of departure, the sending of a
telegram, etc.). It is even possible, for example, that sure of
not being able to conclude a projected deal with this person,
I may return to someone else and sign another contract. Per-
haps I shall even give up the whole attempt. And shall I count
my project as a total failure? In this case I shall say that I
was not able to inform Pierre in time, to come to an under-
standing with him, etc. Is not this explicit recognition of my
powerlessness the clearest admission of the limits of my free-
dom? Of course my freedom to choose, as we have seen, must
not be confused with my freedom to obtain. But is it not my
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 649
very choice which is here brought iato play since the adversity
of the environment is in many cases precisely the occasion
for the changing of my project?
Before attacking the fundamental question at issue here,
it will be well for us to make the question . precise and to
delimit it. If the changes which occur in my environment
can involve modifications of my projects, they must be sub-
ject to two reservations. First, they can not by themselves
effect the abandoning of my principal project which, on the
contrary, serves to measure their importance. In fact, if they
are grasped as the causes of my abandoning this or that
project, it can be only in the light of a more fundamental proj-
ect, otherwise they could not be causes since the cause is
apprehended by the motivating-consciousness which is itself
a free choice of an end. If the clouds which cover the sky can
move me to give up my project of an outing, this is because
they are grasped in a free projection in which the value of
the outing is bound to a certain state of the sky, which step
by step refers back to the value of an outing in general, to my
relation to nature, and to the place which this relation
occupies in the ensemble of relations which I sustain with the
world. Secondly, under no circumstances can the object
which has. appeared or disappeared induce even a partial- re--
nunciation of a project. This object must of necessity be
apprehended as a lack in the original situation; it is necessary
therefore that the given of its appearance or of its disappear-
ance be nihilated, that I effect a withdrawal “in relation to it,”
and consequently that I myself determine myself in' its pres-
ence. We have already shown that even the red-hot pincers
of the torturer do not exempt us from being free. This does
not mean that it is always possible to get around the difficulty,
to repair the damage, but simply that the very impossibility
of continuing in a certain direction must be freely constituted. '
This impossibility comes to things by means of our free re-
nunciation; our renunciation is not induced by the impossi-
bility of maintaining the behavior.
Once this fact has been established, we must recognize
that the presence of the given here again, far from being an
obstacle to our freedom, is demanded by the very existence of
freedom. This freedom is a certain fre^om which 1 am. But
what am I if not a certain internal negation of the in-itself?
Without this in-itself which I deny, I should vanish into
6S0
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
nothingness. In our Introduction we pointed out that con-
sciousness can serve as the “ontological proof” of the exis-
tence of an in-itself. In fact, if there is consciousness of some-
thing, then it is necessary at the start that this “something”
have a real being — that is, a being not relative to conscious-
ness. But we see at present that this proof has a larger bear-
ing: if I am to be able to do something — anything — it is neces-
sary that I exercise my action upon beings whose existence is
in general independent of my existence and in particular
independent of my action. My action can reveal this other exis-
tence to me but does not condition it. To be free is to-be-free-
to-change. Freedom implies therefore the existence of an en-
vironment to be changed: obstacles to be cleared, tools to be
used. Of course it is freedom which reveals them as obstacles,
but by its free choice it can only interpret the meaning of
their being. It is necessary that they be simply there, wholly
brute, in order that there may be freedom. To be free is to-
be-free-to-do, and it is to-be-free-in-the-world. But if this is the
case, then freedom, by recognizing itself as the freedom to
change, recognizes and implicitly foresees in its original project
the independent existence of the given on which it is exercised.
The internal negation reveals the in-itself as independent, and
it is this independence which constitutes in the in-itself its
character as a thing. But consequently what freedom posits by
the simple upsurge of its being is the fact that it is as
having to do with something other than itself. To do is pre-
cisely to change what has no need of something other than
itself in order to exist; it is to act on that which on principle
is indifferent to the action, that which can pursue its exis-
tence or is becoming without the action. Without this indiffer-
ence of exteriority on the part of the in-itself, the very notion
of doing would lose its meaning (as we have shown earlier in
connection with wish and decision), and consequently free-
dom itself would collapse. Thus the very project of a freedom
in general is a choice which implies the anticipation and ac-
ceptance of some kind of resistance somewhere. Not only does
freedom constitute the compass within which in-itselfs other-
wise indifferent will be revealed as resistances, but freedom’s
very project is in general to Jo in a resisting world by means
of a victory over the world’s resistances.
Every free project in projecting itself anticipates a margin
of unpredictability due to the independence of things pre-
cisely because this independence is that in terms of which a
BEING AND DOING; FREEDOM 651
freedom is constituted. As soon as I project going. to the near-
by village to find Pierre, the punctures, the “headwind,” a
thousand foreseeable and unforeseeable accidents are given in
my very project and constitute its meaning. Thus the unex-
pected puncture which upsets my projects comes to take its
place in a world pre-outlmed by my choice, for I have never
ceased, if I may say so, to expect it as unexpected. And even
if my path has been interrupted by something which I should
never have dreamed of — ^like a flood or a landslide — in a
certain sense this unpredictability was foreseen. Just as the
Romans reserved in their temple a place for unknown gods,
so in my project a certain margin of indetermination was
created “for the unpredictable,” and this was done not because
of experience with “hard blows” or an empirical, prudence
but by the very nature of my project. Thus in a certain way,
we can say that human reality is surprised by nothing.
These observations allow us to bring to light a new charac-
teristic of a free choice: every project of freedom is an open
project and not a closed project. Although entirely individual-
ized, it contains within it the possibility of its further modi-
fications. Every project implies in its structure the comprehen-
sion of the Selbstdndigkeit of the things in the world. This
perpetual foreseeing of the unforeseeable as the margin of in-
determination of the project which I am enables us to under-
stand how it is that an accident or a catastrophe,. instead of
surprising me by its unknown or its extraordinary quality, al-
ways overwhelms me by a certain quality which it has of
“bemg already seen — already foreseen,” by its very obvious-
ness and a kind of fatalistic necessity, which we express by
saying, “This was bound to happen.” There is nothing which
astonishes in the world, nothing which surprises us without
our determining ourselves to be surprised. The original theme
of astonishment is not that this or that particular thing exists
within the limits of the world but rather that there is a general
world; that is, that I am thrown among a totality of exis-
tents thoroughly indifferent to me. This is because in choosing
an end, I choose to have relations with these existents and
because these existents have relations among themselves. I
choose that they should enter into combination to make
known to me what I am. Thus the adversity of which things
bear witness to me is pre-outlined by my freedom as one of
its conditions, and it is on a freely projected meaning of adver-
652 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
sity in general that this or that complex can manifest its in-
dividual coefficient of adversity.
Each time that there is a question of the situation it is
necessary to insist on the fact that the state of things de-
scribed has a reverse side. Here also if freedom pre-outlines
adversity in general, then this is one way of sanctioning the
exteriority and indifference of the in-itself. Of course adver-
sity comes to things through freedom, but this is in so far as
freedom illuminates its facticity as “being-in-the-midst-of-an-
in-itself-of-indifference.” Freedom gives itself things as ad-
verse {i.e., it confers on them a meaning which makes them
things), but it is by assuming the very given which will be
meaningful; that is, freedom assumes its exile in the midst of
an indifferent in-itself in order to surpass this exile. Con-
versely, furthermore, the contingent given wJiich is assumed
can support even this primary meaning which is the support
of all others, this “exile in the midst of indifference” only in
and through a free assumption of the for-itself.
Such, in fact, is the primitive structure of the situation; it
appears here in all its clarity. It is by its very surpassing of the
given toward its ends that freedom causes the given to exist
as this given here (previously there was neither this nor that
nor here) and the given thus designated is not formed
in any way whatsoever; it is a brute existent,- assumed in
order to be surpassed. But at the same time that freedom is a
surpassing of this given, it chooses itself as this surpassing of
the given. Freedom is not just any kind of surpassing of any
kind of given. By assuming the brute, given and by confer-
ring meaning on it, freedom has suddenly chosen itself; its end
is exactly to change this given, just as the given appears as this
given in the light of the end chosen. Thus the upsurge of
freedom is the crystallization of an end across a given and
the revelation of a given in the light of an end; these
two structures are simultaneous and inseparable. We shall see
later in fact that the universal values of the chosen ends are
disengaged only by analysis; every choice is the choice of a
concrete change to be bestowed on a concrete given. Every
situation is concrete.
Thus the adversity of things and their potentialities in
general are Uluminated by the end chosen. But there is an
end only for a for-itself which assumes itself as abandoned in
the midst of indifference. By this assumption it brings noth-
BEING AND DOING; FREEDOM 653
ing new into this contingent, brute abandonment except for a
meaning. It is responsible for the fact that henceforth there
is an abandonment, that this abandonment is revealed as a
situation. . . ,
' We have seen in Part Two that the for-itself by its up-
surge causes the in-itself to come into the world; still more
generally, it is by means of nothingness that “there is” the
in-itself — that is, things. We have seen also that the reality-
in-itself is there at hand, with its qualities, without any dis-
tortion or adjunction. We are simply separated from it by
the various types of nihilation which we instate by our very
upsurge: world, space and time, potentialities. We have seen
in particular that although we are surrounded by presences
(this glass, this inkwell, this table, etc.), these presences are
inapprehensible as such, for they release whatever it may be of
them only after a gesture or an act projected by us — ^that is, in
the future. At present we are able to understand the meaning of
this state of things: We are separated from things by nothing
except by our freedom; it is our freedom which is responsible
for the fact that there are things with all their indifference,
their impredictability, and their adversity, and for the fact
that we are inevitably separated from them; for it is on the
ground of nihilation that they appear and that they are re-
vealed as bound one to another. Thus the project of my free-
dom adds nothing to things: it causes there to be things; that
is, precisely, realities provided with a coefficient of adversity
and utilizable instrumentality. Freedom makes these thmgs
reveal themselves in experience — that is, raise themselves
successively on the ground of the world in the course of a
process of temporalization. Finally our freedom causes these
things to manifest themselves as out of reach, independent
separated from me by the very nothingness which I secrete
and which I am. It is because freedom is condemned to be
i^^^~i.e., can not choose itself as freedom — ^that there are
things; that is, a plenitude of contingency at the heart of
which it is itself contingency. It is by the assumption of this
con^gency and by its surpassing that there can be at once a
c/zozce*and an organization of things in situation; and it is the
contingency of freedom and the contingency of the in-itself
which are expressed in situation by the unpredictability
^d the adversity of the environment. Thus I am absolutely
tree and absolutely responsible for my situation. But I am
never free except in situation.
654
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
D. My Fellowman
To live in a world haunted by my fellowman is not only to be
able to encounter the Other at every turn of the road; it is
also to find myself engaged in a world in which instrumental-
complexes can have a meaning which my free project has not
first given to them. It means also that in the midst of this
world already provided with meaning I meet with a mean-
ing which is mine and which I have not given to myself, which
I discover that I “possess already.” Thus when we ask what
the original and contingent fact of existing in a world in
which “there are” also Others can mean for our situation, the
problem thus formulated demands that we study successively
three layers of reality which come into play so as to constitute
my concrete situation: instruments which are already meaning-
ful (a station, a railroad sign, a work of art, a mobilization
notice), the meaning which I discover as already mine (my
nationality, my race, my physical appearance) , and finally the
Other as a center of reference to which these meanings refer.
Everything would be very simple if I belonged to a world
whose meanings were revealed simply in the light of my own
ends. In this case I would dispose of things as instruments or as
instrumental complexes within the limits of my own choice of
myself; it is this choice which would make of the mountain an
obstacle difficult to overcome or a spot from which to get a-
good view of the landscape, etc,; the problem would not be
posed of knowing what meaning this mountain could have in
itself since I would be the one by whom meanings come to
reality in itself. The problem would again be very much sim-
plified if I were a monad without doors or windows and if I
merely knew in some way or other that other monads existed
or were possible, each of them conferring new meanings on
the things which I see. In this case, which is the one to which
philosophers have too often limited themselves in their in-
quiry, it would be sufficient for me to hold other meanings as
possible, and finally the plurality of meanings corresponding
to the plurality of consciousnesses would- coincide very
simply for me with the possibility always open to me of
making another choice of myself. But we have seen that this
monadic conception conceals a hidden solipsism precisely be-
cause it is going to confuse the plurality of meanings which I
can attach to the real and the plurality of meaningful sys-
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 655
terns each one of which refers to a consciousness which I am
not. Moreover on the level of concrete experience this monad-
ic description is revealed as inadequate. There exists, in f act,
something in “my” world other than plurality of possible
meanings; there exist objective meanings which are given to
me as not having been brought to light by me. I, by whom
meanings come to things, I find myself engaged in an already
meaningful world which reflects to me meanings which I
have not put into it. -
One may recall, for example, the innumerable host of
meanmgs which are independent of my choice and which I
discover if I live in a city: streets, houses, shops, streetcars,-
and buses, directing signs, warning sounds, music on the
radio, etc. In solitude, of course, I should discover the brute
and unpredictable existence — this rock, for example — and I
should limit myself, in short, to making there be a rock; that
is, that there should be this existent here and outside of it
nothing. Nevertheless I should confer on it its meaning as “to
be climbed,” “to be avoided,” “to be contemplated,” etc.
When there where the street curves, I discover a building, it
is not only a brute existent which I reveal in the -world;
I do not only cause there to be a “this” qualified in this or
that way; but the meaning of the object which is revealed
then resists me and remains independent of me. I discover
that the property is an apartment house, or a group of offices
belonging to the Gas Company, or a prison, etc. The meaning
here is contingent, independent of my choice; it is presented
with the same indifference as the reality of the in-itself; it is
inade a thing and is not distinguished from the quality of
the in-itself. Similarly the coefficient of adversity in things is
revealed to me before being experienced by me. Hosts of
notices put me on my guard: “Reduce Speed. Dangerous
curve,” “Slow. School,” “Danger,” “Narrow Bridge 100 feet
ahead,” etc. But these meanings while deeply imprinted on
things and sharing in their indifferent exteriority — at least in
appearance — are nonetheless indications for a conduct' to be
adopted, and they directly concern me. I shall cross the street
in the lanes indicated. I shall go into this particular shop to
buy this particular instrument, and a page with directions for
using it is given to buyers. Later I shall use this instrument a
pen, for example, to fill out this or that printed form under
determined conditions.
Am I not going to find in all this strict limits to my free-
656 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
dom? If I do not follow point by point the direction
furnished by others, I shall lose my bearings, I shall
take the wrong street, I shall miss my train, etc. More-
over these notices are most often imperatives: “Enter
here,” “Go out here.” Such is the meaning of the words
“Entrance” and “Exit” painted over doorways. I obey. They
come to add to the coefficient of adversity which I cause to
be born in things, a strictly human coefficient of adversity.
Furthermore if I submit to this organization, I depend on
it. The benefits which it provides me can cease; come civil
disturbance, a war, and it is always the items of prime neces-
sity which become scarce without my having any hand in it.
I am dispossessed, arrested in my projects, deprived of what
is necessary in order for me to accomplish my ends. In par-
ticular we have observed that directions, instructions, orders,
prohibitions, billboards are addressed to me in so far as I am
just anybody; to the extent that I obey them, that I fall into
line, I submit to the goals of a human reality which is just
anybody and I realize them by just any techniques. I am there-
fore modified in my own being since I am the ends which
I have chosen and the techniques which realize them — to any
ends whatsoever, to any techniques whatsoever, any human
reality whatsoever. At the same time since the world never
appears except through the techniques which I use, the
world — it also — is modified. This world, seen through the
use which I make of the bicycle, the automobile, the train in
order that I may traverse the world, reveals to me a counte-
nance strictly correlative with the means which I employ;
therefore it is the countenance which the world offers to every-
body. Evidently it must follow, someone will say, that my
freedom escapes me on every side; there is no longer a
situation as the organization of a meaningful world around
the free choice of my spontaneity; there is a state which is
imposed upon me. It* is this problem which we must now
examine.
There is no doubt that my belonging to an inhabited
world has the value of a fact. It refers to the original fact
of the Other’s presence in the world, a fact which, as we have
seen, can not be deduced from the ontological structure of
the for-itself. And although this fact only makes our factic-
ity more deep-rooted, it does not evolve from our facticity
ill so far as the latter expresses the necessity of the contingency
the for-itself. Rather we must say: the for-itself exists in
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM "657
fact; that is, its existence can not be identical with a reality
engendered in conformity to a law, nor can it be identical
with a free choice. And among the factual characteristics of
this “facticity” — i.e., among those which can neither be
deduced nor proven but which simply “let themselves be
seen” — there is one of these which we call the existence-in-
the-world-in-the-presence-of-others. Whether this factual char-
acteristic does or does not need to be recovered by my
freedom in order to be efficacious in any manner whatsoever
is what we shall discuss a little later. Yet the fact remains
that 'on the level of techniques of appropriating the world,
the very fact of the Other’s existence results in the fact of
the collective ownership of techniques. Therefore facticity is
expressed on this level by the fact of my appearance in a
world which is revealed to me only by collective and already
constituted techniques which aim at. making me apprehend
the world in a form whose meaning has been defined out-
side of me. These techniques are going to ' determine my
belonging to collectivities; to the human race, to the nation-
al collectivity, to the professional and to the family group.
It is even necessary to underscore this fact further: out-
side of my beirig-for-others — of which we shall speak later —
the only positive way which I have to exist my factual be-
longing to these collectivities is the use which I constantly
make’ of the techniques which arise from them. Belonging to
the human race is defined by the use of very elementary
and very general techniques: to know how to walk, to know
how to take hold, to know how to pass judgment on the sur-
face and the relative size of perceived objects, to know how
to speak, to know how in general to distinguish the true
from the false, etc. But we do not possess these techniques
in this abstract and universal form: to know how to speak is
not to know how to pronounce and understand words in gener-
al; it is to know how to speak a certain language and by it to
manifest one’s belonging to humanity on the level of the
national collectivity. Moreover to know how to speak a lan-
guage is not to have an abstract and pure knowledge of the
language as it is defined by academic dictionaries and gram-
mars; it is to make the language one’s own across the peculiar
changes and emphasis brought in by one’s province,
profession, and family. Thus it can be said that the reality of
our belonging tO the human is our nationality and that the
reality of our nationality is our belonging to the family, to
658 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the region, to the profession, etc., in the sense that the
reality of speech is language and that reality of language is
dialect, slang, jargon, etc. And conversely the truth of the
dialect is the language, the truth of the language is speech.
This means that the concrete techniques by which we manifest
our belonging to the family and to the locality refer us to
more abstract and more general structures which constitute
its meaning and essence; these refer to others still more
general until we arrive at the universal and perfectly simple
essence of any technique whatsoever by which any being
whatsoever appropriates the world.
Thus to be French, for example, is only the truth of being
a Savoyard. But to be a Savoyard is not simply to inhabit
the high valleys of Savoy; it is, among a thousand other
things, to ski in the winters, to use the ski as a mode of
transportation. And precisely, it is to ski according to the
French method, not that of Arlberg or of Norway.^® But since
the mountain and the snowy slopes are apprehended only
through a technique, this is precisely to discover the French
meaning of ski slopes. In fact according to, whether one will
employ the Norwegian method, which is better for gentle
slopes, or the French method, which is better for steep slopes,
the same slope will appear as steeper or more gentle exactly as
an upgrade will appear as more or less steep to the bicyclist
according to whether he will “put himself into neutral or low
gear.” Thus the French skier employs a French “gear” to de-
scend the ski fields, and this “gear” reveals to him a particular
type of slope wherever he may be. This is to say that the
Swiss or Bavarian Alps, the Telemark, or the Jura will
always offer to him 'a meaning, difficulties, an instrumental
complex, or a complex of adversity which are purely
French. Similarly it would be easy to show that the
majority of attempts to define the working class amount
to taking as a criterion production, consumption or a certain
type of Weltanschauung springing out of an inferiority com-
plex (Marx-Halbwachs-de Man) ; that is, in all cases certain
techniques for the elaboration or the appropriation of the
world across which there is offered what we shall be able to
“This is a simplification: There are influences and interferences m the
matters of technique; the Arlberg method has been prevalent with us for a
long time. The reader will easily be able to re-establish the facts m their -
complexity.
being and DOING: FREEDOM
659 ,
CHXJ-NVJ ^
call the “proletarian f
‘SJUIS ril. tenin.p.e u.an. ..as
“STSnt a.at f mcug
ticular class or nation does n ' jj factual existence
an ontological structure of my to i«eU my
_i.e., my birth and my certato teSuiques. Now
the world and ,^„ofchosen confer on the world
these techniques which I hav ^ m
its meanings. I* appears th appears to me, with the
terms of my ends whether Ae world apP ;
simple, well-marked Wosmoua of te pn^^^
or with the face to face with the brute .
rrl^^ma'^XSd. a French world,
existent. „jjia or the South, which offers me its mean
• mrh^ing done anything to disclose them,
mgs without “yj'a g „y nation- ^
Let uslookmoreJ^^ly. a provmce, to;
f Li^y, m a Professional group^ rtheTicriste
St“b«Xet:«altVls the professional jargon
* s^eak it or the Alsatian dialect as a hnguisUc
and- statistical stud; ouabte
S°pS?tol,Von“inal Contingency? LinguisUc research cmf
beSaken’here; ftatistics bring to
or semantic changes of a given type, they *o roeon
struct the evolution of a phoneme or a morpheme in a
riven period so that it appears that the word or the syntac-
Ll rme is an individual reality with its meaning and its
history. And in fact individuals seem to have litUe i^u-
ence^ver the evolution of language. Social facts such as-lnva-
sions, great thoroughfares, commercial relaUons seem to be
the essential causes of linguistic changes. But this is because
the question is not placed on the true level of the concrete.
Also we find only what we are looking for. , , ,
For a long time psychologists have observed that the word
is not the concrete element of speech-not even the word
of the dialect or the word of the family with its pamcular
variation; the elementary structure of speech is the sentence.
660 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
It is within the sentence, in fact, that the word can receive
a real function as a designation; outside of the sentence the
word is just a propositional function — when it is not a pure
and simple rubric designed to group absolutely disparate
meanings. Only when it appears in discourse, does it assume a
“holophrastic” character, as has often been pointed out. This
does not mean that the word can be limited by itself to a
precise meaning but that it is integrated in a context as a sec-
ondary form in a primary form. The word therefore has only a
purely virtual existence outside of complex and active orga-
nizations which integrate it. It can not exist “in” a conscious-
ness or an unconscious before the use which is made of it;
the sentence is not made out of words. But we need not be
content with this. Paulhan has shown in Fleurs de Tarbes
that entire sentences, “commonplaces,” do not, any more
than words, pre-exist the use which is made of them. They
are mere commonplaces if they are looked at from the out-
side by a reader who recomposes the paragraph by passing
from one sentence to the next, but they lose their banal and
conventional character if they are placed within the point of
view of the author who saw the thing to be expressed and
who attended to the most pressing things first by producing
an act of designation or re-creation without slowing down
to consider the very elements of this act. If this is true, then
neither the words nor the syntax, nor the “ready-made sen-
tences” pre-exist the use which was made of them. Since the
verbal unity is the meaningful sentence, the latter is a con-
structive act which is conceived only by a transcendence
which surpasses and nihilates the given toward an end. To
understand the word in the light of the sentence is very exactly
to understand any given whatsoever in terms of the situation
and to understand the situation in the light of the original
ends.
To understand a sentence spoken by my companion - is,
in fact, to understand what he “means”— that is, to
espouse his movement of transcendence, to throw myself
with him toward possibles, toward ends, and to return again
to the ensemble of organized means so as to understand them
by their function and their end. The spoken language, more-
over, is always interpreted in terms of the situation. Refer-
ences to the weather, to time, to place, to the environment,
to the situation of the city, of the province, of the country
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
661
are given before the wordA® It is enough for me to have read
the papers arid to have seen Pierre’s healthy appearance
and anxious expression in order for me to understand the
“Things aren’t so good” with which he greets me this morn-
ing. It is not his health which “is not so good” since he has
a rosy complexion, nor is it 'his business nor his household;
it is the situation of our city or of our country. I knew it
already. In asking him; “How goes it?,” I was already out-
lining an interpretation of his reply; I transported myself
already to the four corners of the horizon, ready to return
from there to Pierre in order to understand him. To listen
to conversation is to “speak with,” not simply because we
imitate in order to interpret, but because we must under-
stand in terms of the world.
But if the sentence pre-exists the word, then we are re-
ferred to the speaker as the concrete foundation of his speech.
A word can indeed seem to have a “life” of its own if
one comes upon it in sentences of various epochs. This
borrowed life resembles that of an object in a film fantasy;
for example, a knife which by itself starts slicing a pear.
It is effected by the juxtaposition of instantaneities; it is
cinematographic and is constituted in universal time. But
if words appear to live when one projects a semantic or
morphological film, they are not going to constitute whole
sentences; they are only the tracks of the passage of sentences
as highways are only the tracks of the passage of pilgrims
or caravans. The sentence is a project which can be inter-
preted only in terms of the nihilation of a given (the very
one which one wishes to designate) in terms of a posited
end (its designation which itself supposes other ends in
relation to which it is only a means) . K the given can not
determine the sentence any more than the word can, if on
the contrary the sentence is necessary to illuminate the given
and to make the word understandable, then the sentence is
a moment of the free choice of myself, and it is as such that
it is understood by my companion. If a language is the reality
of speech, if a dialect or jargon is the reality of a language,
then the reality of the dialect is the free acf of designation
by which I choose myself as designating. And this free act
i®We are intentionally oversimplifying. There are influences and interfer-
ences. But the reader will be able to re-establish the facts in their compIe.xity.
(Tr. The French text does not indicate whether this footnote belongs with
this sentence or with a sentence in the preceding paragraph. The exact posi-
tion can hardly be important.)
662
BEING AND NOTPIINGNESS
can not be an cissenibliiig of words. Xo be sure, if it were
a pure assembling of words in conformity with technical
prescriptions (grammatical laws), we could speak of factual
limits imposed on the freedom of the speaker; these limits
would be marked by the material and phonetic nature of the
words, the vocabulary of the language employed, the per-
sonal vocabulary of the speaker (the n words which he has
at his command), the “spirit of the language,” etc., etc.
But we have just shown that such is not the case. It has
been maintained recently that there is a sort of living order
of words, of the dynamic laws of speech, an impersonal
life of the logos — in short that speech is a Nature and that
to some extent man must obey it in order to make use of
it as he does with Nature.” But this is because people in
considering speech frequently wUl take speech that is dead
(/.£?., already spoken) and infuse into it an impersonal life
and force, affinities and repulsions all of which in fact
have been borrowed from the personal freedom of the for-
itself which spoke. People have made of speech a language
which speaks all by itself. This is an error which should
not be made with regard to speech or any other technique.
If we are to make man arise in the midst of techniques which
are applied all by themselves, of a language which speaks
itself, of a science which constructs itself, of a city which
builds itself according to its own laws, if meanings are fixed
in in-itself while we preserve a human transcendence, then
the role of man will be reduced to that of a pilot employing
the determined forces of winds, waves, and tides in order
to direct a ship. But gradually each technique in order to be
directed toward human ends will require another technique;
for example, to direct a boat, it is necessary to speak. Thus we
shall perhaps arrive at the technique of techniques — which
in turn will be applied by itself — but we shall have lost for-
ever the possibility of meeting the technician.
If on the other hand, it is by speaking that we cause words
to exist, we do not thereby suppress the necessary technical
connections or the connections in fact which are articulated
inside the sentence. Better yet, we foimd this necessity. But
in order for it to appear, in order for words to enter into
relations with one another, in order for them to latch on to
one another or repulse one another, it is necessary that they
be united in a synthesis which does not come from them.
* Brice-Parain. Essal sur la logos platoniclen.
663
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
Suppress this synthetic unity and the block which is called
“speech” disintegrates; each word returns to its solitude and
at the same time loses its unity, being parcelled out among
various incommunicable meanings. Thus it is within the
free project of the sentence that the laws of speech are organ-
ized; it is by speaking that I make grammar. Freedom is the
only possible foundation of the laws of language.
Furthermore, for whom do the laws of language exist?
Paulhan has given the essential answer: they are not for the
one who speaks, they are for the one who listens. The person
who speaks is only the choice of a meaning and apprehends
the order of the words only in so far as he makes The
only relations which he will grasp within this organized
complex are specifically those which he has established. Con-
sequently if we discover that two (or several) words hold
between them not one but several defined relations and that
there results from this a multiplicity of meanings which are
arranged in an hierarchy or- opposed to each other — all for
one and the same sentence — if, in short, we discover the
“Devil’s share,” this can be only under the two following
conditions: (1) The words must have been assembled and
presented by a meaningful rapprochement; (2) this synthesis
must be seen from outside — i.e„ by The Other and in the
course of a hypothetical deciphering of the possible meanings
of this rapprochement. In this case, in fact, each word grasp^
first as a square of meaning is bound to another word similar-
ly apprehended. And the rapprochement will be multivocal.
The apprehension of the true meaning (/.e., the one express-
ly willed by the speaker) will be able to put other mean-
ings, in the shade or subordinate them, but it will not suppress
&em. Thus speech, which is a free project for me, has specif-
ic laws for others. And these laws themselves can come
into play only within an original synthesis.
Thus we can grasp the clear distinction between the event
sentence” and a natural event. The natural fact is produced
in conformity to a law which it manifests but which is a
purely external rule of production of which the considered
tact is only one example. The “sentence” as an event contains
within Itself the law of its organization, and it is inside the '
terce one'a sen-
respect to \ ^ ^dopt with
664 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
free project of designating that legal (z.e., grammatical)
relations can arise between the words. In fact, there can be
no laws of speaking before one speaks. And each utterance is
a free project of designation issuing from the choice of a
personal for-itself and destined to be interpreted in terms of
the global situation of this for-itself. What is primary is
the situation in terms of which I understand the meaning
of the sentence; this meaning is not in itself to be considered
as a given but rather as an end chosen in a free surpassing of
means. Such is the only reality which the working linguist
can encounter. From the standpoint of this reality a regressive
analytical work will be able to bring to light certain more
general and more simple structures which are like legal
schemata. But these schemata which would function as laws,
of dialect, for example, are in themselves abstract. Far from
presiding over the constitution of the sentence and being the
mould into which it flows, they exist only in and through this
sentence. In this sense the sentence appears as a free inven-
tion of its own laws. We find here simply the original charac-
teristic of every situation; it is by its very surpassing of the
given as such (the linguistic apparatus) that the free project
of the sentence causes the given to appear as this given (these
laws of word order and dialectal pronunciation). But the
free project of the sentence is precisely a scheme to assume
this given; it is not just any assumption but is aimed at a not
yet existing end across existing means on which it confers
their exact meaning as a rneans.
Thus the sentence is the order of words which become
these words only by means of their very order. This is
indeed what linguists and psychologists have perceived,
and their embarrassment can be of use to us here as a counter-
proof; they believed that they discovered a circle in the formu-
lation of speaking, for in order to speak it is necessary to
know one’s thought. But how can we know this thought as
a reality made explicit and fixed in concepts except precisely
by speaking it? Thus speech refers to thought and thought
to speech. But we understand now that there is no circle or
rather that this circle — from which linguists and psycholo-
gists believed they could escape by the invention of pure
psychological idols such as the verbal image or an imageless,
wordless thought — is not xmique with speech; it is the char-
acteristic of the situation in general. It means nothing else
but the ekstatic connection of the present, the future, and the
665
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
past — that is, the free determination of the existent by the
not-yet-existing and the determination of the not-yet-exist-
ing by the existent. Once we have established this fact, it will
be permissible to uncover abstract operational schemata which
will stand as the legal truth of the sentence: the dialectal
schema — the schema of the national language — ^the linguistic
schema in general. But these schemata far from pre-existing
the concrete sentence are in themselves affected with Unselb-
stdndigkeit and exist always only incarnated and sustained in
their very incarnation by a freedom.
It must be understood, of course, that speech is here only
the example of one social and universal technique. The
same would be true for any other technique. It is the blow
of , the axe which reveals the axe, it: is the hammering which
reveals the hammer. It will be permissible in a particular run
to reveal the French method of skiing and in this method
the general skill of skiing as a human possibility. But this
human skill is never anything by itself alone; it exists only
potentially; it is incarnated and manifested in the actual and
concrete skill of the skier. This enables us to 'outline tenta-
tively a solution for the relations of the individual to the
race. Without the human race, mankind, there is no truth;
that is certain. There would remain only an irrational and
contingent swarming of individual choices to which no law
could be assigned. If some sort of truth exists capable of
unifying the individual choices, it is the human race which
can furnish this truth for us. But if the race is the truth of
the individual, it can not be a given in the individual without
profound contradiction. As the laws of speech are sustained
by and incarnated ia the concrete free project of the sen-
tence, so the human race (as an ensemble of peculiar tech-
niques to define the activity of men), far from pre-existing
an individual who would manifest it in the way' that this
particular fall exemplifies the law of the falling bodies, is the
ensemble of abstract relations sustained by the free individ-
ual choice. The for-itself in order to choose itself as a person
effects the existence of an internal organization which the for-
itself surpasses toward itself, and this internal technical organi-
zation is in it the national or the human.
Ve^ weU, someone will say. But you have dodged the
question. For these linguistic organizations or techniques
have not been created by the for-itself so that it may find itself;
it has got them from others. The rule for the agreement of
666 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
participles does not exist, I admit, outside of the free rap-
prochement of concrete participles in view of an end with
a particular designation. But when I employ this rule, I have
learned it from others; it is because others in their personal
projects cause it to be and I make use of it myself. My
speech is then subordinated to the speech of others and ,
ultimately to the national speech.
We should not think of denying this fact. For that mat-
ter our problem is not to show that the for-itself is the free
foundation of its being; the for-itself is free but within a condi-
tion, and it is the relation of this condition to freedom that we
are trying to define by making clear the meaning of the situa-
tion. What we have just established, in fact, is only a part of
reality. We have shown that the existence of meanings which
do not emanate from the for-itself can not constitute an
external limit of its freedom. As a for-itself one is not man
first in order to be oneself subsequently and one does not
constitute oneself as oneself in terms of a human essence
given a priori. Quite the contrary, it is in its effort to
choose itself as a personal self that the for-itself sustains in
existence certain social and abstract characteristics which make
of it a man (or a woman); and the necessary connections
which accompany the essential elements of man appear only
on the foundation of a free choice; in this sense each for-itself
is responsible in its being for the existence of a human race.
But it is necessary for us again to stress the undeniable fact
that the for-itself can choose itself only beyond certain mean-
ings of which it is not the origin. Each for-itself, in fact, is a
for-itself only by choosing itself beyond nationality and
race just as it speaks only by choosing the designation be-
yond the syntax and morphemes. This “beyond” is enough
to assure its total independence in relation to the structures
which it siurpasses; but the fact remains that it constitutes
itself as beyond in relation to these particular structures.
What does this mean? It means that the for-itself arises in
a world which is a world for other for-itselfs. Such is the
given. And thereby, as we have seen, the meaning of the
world is alien to the for-itself. This means simply that each
man ^ds himself in the presence of meanings which do not
come into the world through him. He arises in a world which
is given to him as already looked-at, furrowed, explored,
worked over in all its meanings, and whose very contex-
ture is already defined by these investigations. In the very
BEING, AND DOING: FREEDOM 667
act by which he unfolds his , time, he temporalizes himself
in a world whose temporal meaning is already defined by
other temporalizations: this is the fact of simultaneity. We
are not dealing here with a limit of freedom; rather it is
in this world that the for-itself must be free; that is, it
must choose itself by taking into account these circumstances
and not ad libitum. But on the other hand, the for-itself —
i.e., man — in rising up does not merely suffer the Other’s
existence; he is compelled to make the Other’s existence man-
ifest to himself in the form of a choice.. For it is by a choice
that he will apprehend the Other as The-Other-as-subject
or as The-Other-as-object.^^ Inasmuch as the Other is for him
the Other-as-a-look, there can be no question of techniques
or of foreign - meanings; the for-itself experiences itself as
an object in the Universe beneath the Other’s look. But
as soon as the for-itself by surpassing the Other toward its
ends makes of him a transcendence-transcended, that
which was a free surpassing of the given toward ends appears
to it as meaningful, given conduct in the world (fixed in
in-itself). The Other-as-object becomes an indicator of ends
and by its own free project, the For-itself throws itself into
a world' in which conducts-as-objects designate ends. Thus
the Other’s presence as a transcended transcendence reveals
given complexes of means to ends. And as the end decides
the means and the means the end by its upsurge in the face
of the Other-as-object, the For-itself causes ends in the
world -to be indicated to itself; it comes into a world peopled
by ends. But if consequently the techniques and their ends
arise in the look of the For-itself, we must necessarily recog-
nize that it is by means of the free assumption of a position
by the For-iself confronting the Other that they become
techniques. The Other by himself alone can not cause these
projects to be revealed to the For-itself as techniques; and due
to this fact there exists for the Other, in so far as he tran-
scends himself toward his possibles, no technique but a con-
crete doing which is defined in terms of his individual end.
The shoe-repairer who puts a new sole on a shoe does not
experience himself as “in the process of applying a tech-
nique’’; he apprehends the situation as demanding this or
,that action, that particular piece of leather, as requiring a
hammer, etc. The For-itself, as soon as it assumes a position
“ We shall see later that the problem is more complex. But these remarks
are sufficient for the present.
668 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
^jjji rGspsct to ths Other, esuses techniques to urise in the
world as the conduct of the Other as a transcendence-tran-
scended. It is at this moment and this moment only that
there appear in the world— bourgeois and workers, French
and Germans, in short, men.
Thus the For-itself is responsible for the fact that the
Other’s conduct is revealed in the world as techniques. The
for-itself can not cause the world in which it arises to be
furrowed by this or that particular technique (it can not make
itself appear in a world which is “capitalistic” or “governed
by a natural economy” or in a “parasitic civilization"), but it
causes that which is lived by the Other as a free project to
exist outside as technique; the for-itself achieves this precisely
by making itself the one by whom an outside comes to the
Other. Thus it is by choosing itself and by historicizing itself
in the world that the For-itself historicizes the world itself
and causes it to be dated by its techniques. Henceforth, pre-
cisely because the techniques appear as objects, the For-itself
can choose to appropriate them. By arising in a world in
which Pierre and Paul speak in a certain way, stick to the
right when driving a bicycle or a car, etc., and by constituting
these free patterns of conduct into meaningful objects, the
For-itself is responsible for the fact that there is a world in
which they stick to the right, in which they speak French,
etc. It causes the internal laws of the Other’s act, which were
originally founded and sustained by a freedom engaged in a
project, to become now objective rules of the conduct-as-
object; and these rules become universally valid for all anal-
ogous conduct, while the supporter of the conduct or the
agent-as-object becomes simply anybody. This historization,
which is the effect of the for-itself’s free choice, in no way
restricts its freedom; quite the contrary, it is in this world
^d no other that its freedom comes into play; it is in connec-
tion with its existence in this world that it puts itself into
question. For to be free is not to choose the historic world in
which one arises — ^which would have no meaning — but to
choose oneself in the world whatever this may be.
In this sense it would be absurd to suppose that a certain
state of techniques is restrictive to human possibilities. Of
course a contemporary of Duns Scotus is ignorant of the use
of the automobile or the airplane; but he appears as ignorant
to us and only from our point of view because we privately
apprehend him in terms of a world where the automobile and
. BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 669
the airplane exist. For him, who has no relation of any kind
with these objects and the techniques which refer to them,
there exists a kind of absolute, unthinkable, and undecipher-
able nothingness. Such a nothingness can in no way limit the
For-itself which is choosing itself; it can not'be apprehended
as a lack, no matter how we consider it. The For-itself which
historicizes itself in the time of Duns Scotus therefore nihilates
itself in the heart of a fullness of being — ^that is, of a world
which like ours is everything which it can be. It would be
absurd to declare that the Albigenses lacked heavy artillery to
use in resisting Simon de Montfort; for the Seigneur de Tren-
cavel or the Comte de Toulouse chose themselves such as
they were in a world in which artillery had no place: they
viewed politics in that world; they made plans for military
resistance in that world; they chose themselves as sympathizers
with the Cathari in that world; and as they were only what
they chose to be, they were absolutely in a world as absolutely
fuU as that of the Panzerdivisionen or of the R.A.F.
What is true for material techniques applies as well to more
subtle techniques.' The fact of existing as a petty noble in
Languedoc at the time of Raymond VI is not determining if
it is placed in,jhe feudal world in which this lord exists and
in which he chooses himself. It appears as privative only if
we commit the error of considering this division of Francia
and of the Midi from the actual point of view of French unity.
The feudal world offered to the vassal lord of Raymond VI in-
finite-possibilities of choice; we do not possess more. A ques-
tion just as absurd is often posited in a kind of utopian
dream: what would Descartes have been if he had known' of
contemporary physics? This is to suppose that Descartes
possesses an a priori nature more or less limited and altered
by the state of science in his time and that we could transport
this brute nature to the contemporary period in which it
would react to more extensive and more exact knowledge. But
this is to forget that Descartes is what he has chosen to be,
that he is an absolute choice of himself from the standpoint
of a world of various kinds of knowledge and of techniques
which this choice both assumes and illuminates. Descartes is
an absolute upsurge at an absolute date and is perfectly un-
thinkable at another date, for he has made his date by making
himself. It is he and not another who has determined the exact
state of the mathematical knowledge immediately before bim_,
not by an empty inventory which would be made from no
670 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
point of view and would be related to no axis of coordina-
tion, but by establishing the principles of analytical geometry
— that is, by inventing precisely the axis of coordinates which
would permit us to define the state of this knowledge. Here
again it is free invention and the future which enable us to
illuminate the present; it is the perfecting of the technique in
view of an end which enables us to evaluate the state of the
technique.
Thus when the For-itself affirms itself in the face of the
Other-as-object, by the same stroke it reveals techniques. Con-
sequently it can appropriate them — that is, interiorize them.
But suddenly there are the following consequences: (1) By
employing a technique, the For-itself surpasses the technique
toward its own end; it is always beyond the technique which
it employs. (2) The technique which was originally a pure,
meaningful conduct fixed in some Other-as-object, now, be-
cause it is interiorized, loses its character as a technique and is
integrated purely and simply in the free surpassing of the
given toward ends; it is recovered and sustained by the free-
dom which founds it exactly as dialect or speech is sustained
by the free project of the sentence. Feudalism as a technical
relation between man and man does not exist; it is only a pure
abstract, sustained and surpassed by the thousands of individ-
ual projects of a particular man who is a liege in relation to
his lord. By this we by no means intend to arrive at a sort of
historical nominalism. We do not mean that feudalism is the
sum of the relations of vassals and suzerains. On the contrary,
we hold that it is the abstract structure of these relations;
every project of a man of this.time must be realized as a sur-
passing toward the concrete of this abstract moment It is
therefore not necessary to generalize in terms of numerous de-
tailed experiences in order to establish the principles of the_
feudal technique; this technique exists necessarily and com-
pletely in each individual conduct and it can be brought to
light in each case. But it is there only to be surpassed. In the
same way the For-itself can not be a person — i.e., choose
the ends which it is — without being a man or woman, a mem-
ber of a national collectivity, of a class, of family, etc. But
these are abstract structures which the For-itself sustains and
surpasses by its project. It makes itself French, a man of a
southern province, a workman in order to be itself at the hori-
zon of these determinations. Similarly the world which is re-
vealed to the For-itself appears as provided with certain mean-
671
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
ings correlative with the techniques adopted. It appears as a
world-for-the-Frenchman, a world-for-the-worker, etc,, with
all the characteristics which would - be expected. But these
characteristics do not possess Selbstdndigkeit. The world
which allows itself to be revealed as French, proletarian, etc.,
is before all else a world which is illuminated by the For-
itself’s own ends, its own world.
Nevertheless the Other’s existence brings a factual limit
to my freedom. This is because of the fact that by means of
the upsurge of the Other there appear certain determinations
which I am without having chosen them. Here I am — ^Jew or
Aryan, handsome or ugly, one-armed, etc. All this I am
for the Other with no hope of apprehending this meaning
which I have outside and, still more important, with no hope
of changing it. Speech alone will inform me of what I am;
again this will never be except as the object of an empty in-
tention; any intuition of it is forever denied me. If my race or
my physical appearance were only an image in the Other or
the Other’s opinion of me, we should soon have done with it;
but we have seen that we are dealing with objective character-
istics which define me m my being-for-others. As soon as a
freedom other than mine arises confronting me, I begin to
exist in a new dimension of being; and this time it is not a
question of my conferring a meaning on brute existents or
of accepting responsibility on my own account for the mean-
ing which Others have conferred on certain objects. It is I
myself who see a meaning conferred upon me, and I do not
have the recourse of accepting the responsibility of this mean-
ing which I have since it can not be given to me except in the
^ form of an empty indication. Thus something of myself-^ac-
- cording to this new dimension — exists in the manner of the
given; at least for me, since this being which I am is suffered,
it is without being existed. I learn of it and suffer it in and
through the relations which I enter into with others, in and
through their conduct with regard to me. I encounter this
being at the origin of a thousand prohibitions and a thou-
sand resistances which I bump up against at each instant: Be-
cause I am a minor I shall not have this or that privilege. Be- -
cause 1 am a Jew I shall be deprived — in certain societies —
of certain possibilities, etc. Yet I am unable in any way to
feel myself as a Jew or as a minor or as a Pariah. It is at this
point that I can react against these interdictions by declaring
that race, for example, is purely and simply a collective fiction.
672 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
that only individuals exist. Thus here I suddenly encounter
the total alienation of my person! I am something which
have not chosen to be. )A^at is going to be the result of this
for the situation?
We must recognize that we have just encountered a real
limit to our freedom — that is, a way of being which is im-
posed on us without our freedom being its foundation. Still it
is necessary to understand this: the limit imposed does not
come from the action of others. In a preceding chapter we
observed that even torture does not dispossess us of our free-
dom; when we give in, we do so freely. In a more general
way the encounter with a prohibition in my path (“No Jews
allowed here,” or “Jewish restaurant. No Aryans allowed,”
etc.) refers us to the case considered earlier (collective tech-
niques), and this prohibition can have meaning only on and
through the foundation of my free choice. In fact according
to the free possibilities which I choose, I can disobey the
prohibition, pay no attention to it, or, on the contrary, confer
upon it a coercive value which it can hold only because of the
weight which I attach to it. Of course the prohibition fully
retains its character as an “emanation from an alien will”; of
course it has for its specific structure the fact of taking me
for an object and thereby manifesting a transcendence which
transcends me. Still the fact remains that it is not incarnated
in my universe, and it loses its peculiar force of compulsion
only within the limits of my own choice and according to
whether under any circumstances I prefer life to death or
whether, on the contrary, I judge that in certain particular
cases death is preferable to certain kinds of life, etc. The
true limit of my freedom lies purely and simply in the very
fact that an Other apprehends me as the Other-as-object and
in that second corollary fact that my situation ceases for the
Other to be a situation and becomes an objective form in
which I exist as an objective structure. It is this alienating
process of making an object of my situation which is the con-
stant and specific limit of my situation, just as the making an
object of my being-for-itself in being-for-others is the limit pf
my being. And it is precisely these two characteristic linuts
which represent the boundaries of my freedom.
In short, by the fact- of the Other’s existence, I exist in a
situation which has an outside and which due to this very
fact has a dimension of alienation which I can in no way re-
move from the situation any more than I can act directly upon
673
BEING AND DOING; FREEDOM
it. This limit to my freedom is, as we see, posited by the
Other’s pure and simple existence — ^that is, by the fact that
my transcendence exists for a transcendence. Thus we grasp a
truth of great importance: we saw e^lier, keeping ourselves
within the compass of existence-for-itself, that only my free-
dom can limit my freedom; we see now, when we include
the Other’s existence in our considerations, that my freedom
on t his new level finds its limits also in the existence of the
Other’s freedom. Thus on whatever level we place ourselves,
the only limits which a freedom can encounter are found in
freedom. Just as thought according to Spinoza can be limited
only by thought, so freedom can be limited only by freedom.
Its limitation as internal finitude stems from the fact that it
can not not-be freedom — ^that is, it is condemned to be free;
its limitation as external finitude stems from the fact that
being freedom, it is for other freedoms, freedoms which freely
apprehend it in the light of their own ends.
Once this is posited, we must observe first that this
alienation of the situation does not represent an inner
flaw nor the introduction of the given as a brute resistance
in the situation such as I live it. Quite the contrary, the
alienation is neither an inner modification nor a partial
change of the situation; it does not appear in the course of the
temporalization; I never encounter it in the situation, and it is
consequently never released to my intuition. But on princi-
ple it escapes me; it is the very exteriority of the situation —
that is, its being-outside-for-others. Therefore we have to do
with an essential characteristic of all situations in general; this
characteristic can not act upon its content, but it is accepted
and_recovered by the same being who puts himself into a sit-
uation. Thus the very meaning of our free choice is to cause
a situation to arise which expresses this choice, a situation
the essential characteristic of which is to be alienated; that is,
to exist as a form in itself for the Other. We can not escape
this alienation since it would be absurd even to think of
existing otherwise than in situation. This characteristic is not
manifested by an internal resistance; on the contrary, one
makes proof of it in and through its very inapprehensibility.
It is therefore ultimately not a head-on obstacle which free-
dom encounters but a sort of centrifugal force in the very
natme of freedom, a weakness in the basic “stuff” of freedom
which causes everything which it undertakes to have always
one face which freedom will not have chosen, which escapes
674
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
it and which for the Other will be pure existence. A freedom
which would will itself freedom could by the same token wiU
only this character. Yet this character does not belong to the
nature of freedom; for there is here no nature; moreover if
there were one, this characteristic could not be deduced from
it since Others’ existence is an entirely contingent fact. To
come into the world as a freedom confronting Others is to
come into the world as alienable. -If to will oneself free is to
choose to be in this world confronting Others, then the one
who wills himself such must will also the passion of his
freedom.
On the other hand, I do not objectively disclose and
establish the alienated situation and my own being-alienated.
In the first place, indeed, we have just seen that on principle
everything which is alienated exists only for the Other. But
in addition a pure establishment, even if it were possible,
would be insufficient. In fact I can not make proof of this
alienation without by the same stroke recognizing the Other
as a transcendence. And this recognition, as we have seen,
would have no meaning if it were not a free recognition of
the Other’s freedom. By this free recognition of the Other
across the proof which I make of my alienation, I assume my
being-for-others, whatever it may be, and I assume it precisely
because it is my link with the Other. Thus I can apprehend
the Other as a freedom only within the free project of appre-
hending him as such (in fact it always remains possible for
me to apprehend the Other freely as an object) ; and the free
project of the recognition of the Other is not distinct from
the free assumption of my being-for-others.
Now then we can see how my freedom in a way recovers its
own limits, for I can grasp myself as limited by the Other
only in so far as the Other exists for me, and I can make the
Other exist for me only as a subjectivity recognized by my
assuming my being-for-others. There is no circle here. By
the free assumption of this being-alienated which I ex-
perience, I suddenly make the Other’s transcendence exist for
me as such. It is only by my recognizing the freedom of anti-*
Semites (whatever use they may make of it) and by my^
assuming this being-a-Jew that I am a Jew for them; it is only
thus that being-a-Jew will appear as the external objective
limit of the situation. If, on the contrary, it pleases me to
consider the anti-Semites as pure objects, then my being-a-
Jew disappears immediately to give place to the simple con-
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 675
sciousness (of) being a free, unqualiBable transcendence. To
recognize others and, if I am a Jew, to assume my being-a-Jew
are one and the same. Thus the Other’s freedom confers limits
on my situation, but I can experience these limits only if I
recover this being-for-others which I am and if I give to it a
meaning in the light of the ends which I have chosen. Of
course, this very assumption is alienated; it has its outside,
but it is through this assumption that I can experience my
being-outside as outside.
How then shall I experience the objective limits of my
being: Jew, Aryan, ugly, handsome, Idnd, a civil servant,
untouchable, etc. — ^when will speech have informed me
as to which of these are my limits? It can not be in the
way in which I intuitively apprehend the Other’s beauty,
ugliness, race, nor in the way in which I have a non-thetic
consciousness (of) projecting myself toward this or that
possibility. It is not that these objective characteristics must
necessarily be abstract; some are abstract, others not. My
beauty or my ugliness or the insignificance of my features axe
apprehended by the Other in their full concreteness, and
it is this^concreteness which the Other’s speech will indicate
to me; it is toward this that I shall emptily direct myself.
Therefore we are not dealing with an abstraction but with an
ensemble of structures, of which certam are abstract but whose
totality is an absolute concrete, an ensemble which simply is
indicated to me as on principle escaping me. This ensemble
is in fact what I am. Now we observed at the beginning of
Part Two that the for-itself can not be anything. For-myself
I am not a professor jot a waiter in a cafe, nor am I handsome
or ugly, Jew or Aryan, spiritual, vulgar, or distinguished.
We shall call these characteristics unrealizables. We must be
careful not to confuse them with the imaginary. We have to
do with perfectly real existences; but those for which these
characteristics are really given are not these characteristics,
and I who am them can not realize them. If I am told that I
am vulgar, for example, I have often grasped by intuition as re-
gards others the nature of vulgarity; thus I can apply the word
“vulgar” to my person. But I can not join the meaning of
this word to my person. There is here exactly the indication
of a connection to be effected but one which could be made
only by an interiorization and a subjectivizing of the vulgarity
or by the objectivizing of the person — two operations
676 - , BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
which involve the immediate collapse of the reality in
question.
Thus we are surrounded by an infinity of unrealizables.
Certain among these unrealizables we feel vividly as irritating
absences. Who has not felt a profound disappointment at
not being able after his return from a long exile to realize
that he "is in Paris”? The objects are there and offer them-
selves familiarly, but I am only an absence, only the pure
nothingness which is necessary in order that there may be a
Paris. My friends, my relatives offer the image of a promised
land when they say to me: “At last you are here! You have
returned! You are in Paris!” But access to this promised
land is wholly denied me. And if the majority of people
deserve the reproach of “applying a double standard” accord-
ing to whether they are considering others or themselves, if
when they perceive that they are guilty of a fault which they
had blamed in someone else the day before, they have a
tendency to say, “That’s not the same thing,” this is because
in fact “it is not the same thing.” The one action is a given
object of moral evaluation; the other is a pure transcendence
which carries its justification in its very existence since its
being is a choice. We shall be able to convince its agent by
a comparison of the results that the two acts have a strictly
identical “outside,” but the best will in the world will not
allow him to realize this identity. Here is the source of a
good part of the troubles of the moral consciousness, in par-
ticular despair at not being able truly to condemn oneself,
at not being able to realize oneself as guilty, at feeling per-
petually a gap between the expr;essed meaning of the words:
“I am guilty, I have sinned,” etc., and the' real apprehension
of the situation. In short this is the origin of all the anguish
of a “bad conscience,”^^ that is, the consciousness of bad
faith which has for its ideal a self-judgment — i.e., taking
toward oneself the point of view of the Other.
But if some particular kind of unrealizables have impressed
us more than others, if they have become the object of
psychological descriptions, they must not blind us to the
fact that unrealizables are infinite in number since they repre-
sent the reverse side of the situation.
20 Xr. There is no distinction in French between “conscience” and "con-
sciousness,” both of winch are expressed by the word conscience. This is, I
e eve, the only passage in Being and Nothingness in which Sartre intends
to emphasize the idea of a “conscience” (English sense).
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 677
These unrealizables, however, are not only appresented to
us as unrealizables; in fact in order that they may have the
character of unrealizables, they must be revealed in the light
of some project aiming at realizing them. This is indeed
what we noted earlier when we were showing how the
for-itself assumes its being-for-others in and by the very act
which recognizes the existence of others. Correlatively there-
fore with this assuming project, the unrealizables are revealed
as to be realized. At first, indeed, the assumption is made
in the perspective of my fundamental project. I do not
limit myself to receiving passively the meaning “ugliness,”
“infirmity,” “race,” etc., but, on the contrary, 1 can grasp these
characteristics — ^in the simple capacity of a meaning — only
in the light of my own ends. This is what is expressed — but by
completely reversing the terms — when it is said that the fact
of being of a certain race can determine a reaction of pride or
the ugliness can appear only within the limits of my own
choice of inferiority or of pride;^^ in other words, they can
appear only with a meaning which my freedom confers on
them. This means once again that they are for the Other but
that they can be for me only if I choose them. The law of my
freedom which makes me unable to be without choosing
myself applies here too: I do not choose to be for the
Other what I am, but I can try to be for myself what I am
for the Other, by choosing myself such as I appear to the
Other — i.e., by an elective assumption. A Jew is not a Jew
first in order to be subsequently ashamed or proud; it is
his pride of being a Jew, his shame, or his indifference
which will reveal to him his being-a-Jew; and this being-
’ a-Jew is nothing outside the free manner of adopting it.
Although I have at my disposal an infinity of ways of assum-
ing my being-for-others, / am not able not to assume it.
We find here again that condemnation to freedom which we
defined above as facticity. I can neither abstain totally in
relation to what I am (for the Other) — ^for to refuse is not
to abstain but still to assume — nor can I submit to it passively
(which in a sense amounts to the same thing). Whether in
fury, hate, pride, shame, disheartened refusal or joyous de-
mand, it is necessary for me to choose to be what I am.
Thus the unrealizables are revealed to the for-itself as
“unrealizables-to-be-realized.” They do not thereby lose their
^ Or of any other choice of my ends.
678 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
character as limits; quite the contrary, it is as objective and
external limits that they are presented to the for-itself as
to be interiorized. They have therefore a character which is
distinctly obligatory. In fact we are not dealing with an
instrument revealing itself as “to be employed” in the move-
ment of the free project which I am. Here the unrealizable
appears as an a priori limit given to my situation (since I
am such for the Other) and hence as an existent which does
not wait for me to give it existence; but also it appears as
able to exist only in and through the free project by which
I shall assume it — the assumption evidently being identical
with the synthetic organization of all the conduct aimed at
realizing the unrealizable for me. At the same time since
it is given in the capacity of an unrealizable, it is mani-
fested as beyond all the attempts which I can make to realize
it. The unrealizable is an a priori which requires my engage-
ment in order to be, while depending only on this engage-
ment and while placing itself at the start beyond any attempt
to realize it. What then is this if not precisely an impera-
tive? It is indeed to be interiorized (that is, it comes from
the outside as does every fact) but the order, whatever it
may be, is defined always as an exteriority recovered in
inferiority. If an order is to be order — and not a flatus vocis
or a pure factual given which one merely seeks to change —
it is necessary that I reassume it with my freedom, that I
make of it a structure of my free projects. But if the order
is to be order and not a free movement toward my own ends,
it must necessarily preserve at the very heart of my free choice
its character as exteriority. It is the exteriority which remains
exteriority even in and through the attempt on the part of
the For-itself to interiorize it. This is precisely the defini-
tion of the unrealizable to be realized; that is why it is given
as an imperative.
But we can go further in the description of this unrealiz-
it is in fact my limit. But precisely because it is tny
limit it can not exist as the limit of a given being but only
as the limit of my freedom. This means that my freedom by
freely choosing itself chooses its limits; or, if you prefer, the
free choice of my ends (i.e., of what I am for myself) in-
cludes the assumption of the limits of this choice, whatever
they may be. Here again the choice is a choice of finitude
as we indicated earlier, but whereas the chosen finitude is an
inner finitude — i.e., the determination of freedom by itself —
679
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
the finitude assumed by the recovery of unrealizables is an
external finitude. I choose to have a being at a distance,
which limits all my choices and constitutes their reverse side;
that is, I choose that my choice bo limited by something other
than itself. If I should grow angry over it and attempt in
every way to recover these limits, as we saw in the preceding
section of this work, even the most energetic of these attempts
at recovery must of necessity have its foundation in the
free recovery as limits of the limits which one wishes to
interiorize. Thus freedom is fully responsible and makes the
unrealizable limits enter into the situation by choosing to be
a freedom limited by the Other’s freedom. Consequently the
external limits of the situation become a situation-limit —
that is, they are incorporated in the interior of the situation
with the characteristic “unrealizable” as “unrealizables to be
realized.” As a chosen and fugitive reverse side of my choice,
they become a meaning of my desperate effort to be although
they are situated a priori beyond this effort exactly as death —
another type of unrealizable which we do not have to con-
sider for the moment — becomes a situation-limit on con-
dition that it be taken as an event of life even though it
points toward a world where my presence and my life are
no longer realized — Le., toward what is beyond life.
The fact that there is a beyond for life, a beyond which
derives its meaning only through and in liiy life and which
yet remains for me an unrealizable, and the fact that there
is a freedom beyond my freedom, a situation beyond my
situation and one for whiclv what I live as a situation is given
as an objective form in the midst of the world: here are two
types of situation-limit which have the paradoxical character
of limiting my freedom on every side and yet not having
any other meaning than that which my freedom confers
on them. For class, for race, for the body, for the Other,
for function, etc., there is a “being-free-for .” By it the
For-itself projects itself toward one of its possibles which
is always its ultimate possible, for the envisaged possibility is
a possibility of seeing itself; that is, of being another
than itself in order to see itself from outside. In one case
as in the other there is a projection of self toward an “ulti-
mate” which thereby interiorized becomes thematic out-of-
reach meaning of hierarchized possibles. One can “be-in-order-
t(>be-French,” “be-in-order-to-be-a-worker,” the son of a
kmgcan “be-in-order-to-reign.” We are dealing here with
680
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
limits and negating states of our being which we- have to
assume in the sense in which, for example, the Zionist Jew
resolutely assumes himself within his race — that is, assumes
concretely and once and for all the permanent alienation
of his being; in the same way the revolutionary worker, by
his very revolutionary project assumes a “being-in-order-to-
be-a-worker.” And we shall note as Heidegger did (although
the expressions “authentic” and “unauthentic” which he
employs are dubious and insincere because of their implicit
moral content) that the attitude of refusal and of flight which
remains always possible is despite itself the free assumption
of what it is fleeing. Thus the bourgeois makes himself a
bourgeois by denying that there are any classes, just as the
worker makes himself a worker by asserting that classes
exist and by realizing through his revolutionary activity
his “being-in-a-class.” But these external limits of freedom,
precisely because they are external and are interiorized only
as unrealizables, will never be either a real obstacle for free-
dom or a limit suffered. Freedom is total and infinite, which
does not mean that it has no limits but that it never encoun-
ters them. The only limits which freedom bumps up against
at each moment are those which it imposes on itself and of
which we have spoken in connection with the past, with the
environment, and with techniques.
E. My Death
After death had appeared to us as pre-eminently non-
human since it was what there was on the other side of
the “wall,” we decided suddenly to consider it from a
wholly different point of view — that is, as an event of
human life. This change is easily explained: death is a
boundary, and every boundary (whether it be final or initial)
is a Janus bifrons. Whether it is thought of as adhering to
the nothingness of being which limits the process considered
or whether on the contrary it is revealed as adhesive to the
series which it terminates, in either case it is a being which
belongs to an existent process and which in a certain
v^y constitutes the meaning of the process. Thus the final
chord of a melody always looks on the one side toward
silence— that is, toward the nothingness of sound which
will follow the melody; in one sense it is made with the
681
BEING AND DOING; FREEDOM
silence since the silence which will follow is already present
in the resolved chord . as its meaning. But on the other side
it adheres to this plenum of being which is the melody
intended; without the chord this melody would remain in the
air, arid this final indecision would flow back from note to
note to confer on each of them the quality of being unfin-
ished.
Death has always been — ^rightly or wrongly is what we
can not yet determine — considered as the final boundary of
human life. As such it was natural that a philosophy which
was primarily concerned to make precise the human position
in relation to the non-human which surrounded it would
first consider death as a door opening upon the nothingness
of human-reality, and that this nothingness would be the
absolute cessation of being or else existence in a non-human
form. Thus we may say that there has been — in correlation
with the great realist theories — a realistic conception of
death such that death appeared as an immediate contact with
the non-human. Thus death escaped man at the same time
that it rounded him off with the non-human absolute. It was
not possible, of course, for an idealist and humanistic; concep-
tion of the real to tolerate the idea that man would encounter
the non-human even as his limit. It would then have sufficed,
in fact, to adopt the point of view of this limit in order to -
illuminate man with non-human light.^^ idealist attempt
to recover death was not originally the feat of philosophers
but that of poets like Rilke or novelists like Malraux. It was
sufficient to consider death as the final term belonging to the
series. If the series thus recovers its terminus ad quern, then
precisely because of this ad which indicates its interiority, ‘
death as the end of life is interiorized and humanized. Man
can no longer encounter anything but the human; there is no
longer any other side of life, and death is a human phenom--
-enon; it is the final phenomenon of life and is still life. As
such it influences the entire life by a reverse flow. Life is
limited by life; it becomes like the world of Einstein, “finite
but unlimited.” Death becomes the meaning of life as the
resolved chord is the meaning of the melody. There is noth-
ing miraculous in this; it is one term in_the series under
consideration, and, as one knows, each term of a series
is always present in all the terms of the series.
But death thus recovered does not remain simply human; it
22 See, for example, the realistic Platonism of Morgan in Sparkenbrook.
682 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
becomes mine. By being interiori 2 ed it is individualized.
Death is no longer the great unknowable which limits the
human; it is the phenomenon of my personal life which
makes of this life a unique life — that is, a life which does
not begin again, a life in which one never recovers his stroke.
Hence I become responsible for my death as for my life. Not
for the empirical and contingent phenomenon of my decease
but for this character of finitude which causes my life like
my death to be my life. It is in this sense that Rilke attempts
to show that the end of each man resembles his life because
all his individual life has been a preparation for this end.
In this sense Malraux in Les Conquerants shows that
European culture by giving to certain Asiatics the meaning
of their death suddenly penetrates them with this despairing
and intoxicating truth that “life is unique.” It was left to
Heidegger to give a philosophical form to this humanization
of death. In fact if the Dasein actually suffers nothing pre-
cisely because it is a project and an anticipation, then it
must be an anticipation and a project of its own death
as the possibility of no longer realizing presence in the
world. Thus death has become the peculiar possibility of the
Dasein, the being of human-reality is defined as Sein zum
Tode. Inasmuch as the Dasein determines its project toward -
death, it realizes freedom-to-die and constitutes itself as a
totality by its free choice of finitude.
It appears at first that we can not but be attracted to such
a theory: by interiorndng death, it serves our own ends; this
apparent limit of our freedom by being interiorized is re-
covered by freedom. Yet neither the advantage of these views
nor the undeniable portion of truth which they include should
mislead us. It is necessary to take the question up again from
the beginning.
It is certain that human-reality, by whom the quality of
being a world comes to the real, can not encounter the non-
human; the very concept of the non-human is man’s concept.
Therefore even if in-itself death were a passage to an absolute
non-human, we should stiU have to abandon any hope of con-
sidering it as a window giving out upon that absolute. Death
reveals to us only ourselves and that from a human point of
view. Does this mean that death belongs a priori to human
reality?
What must be noted first is the absurd character of death.
In this sense every attempt to consider it as a resolved chord
683
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
at the end of a melody must be sternly rejected. It has often
been said that we are in the situation of a condemned man
among other condemned men who is ignorant of the day of
his execution but who sees each day that his fellow
prisoners are being executed. This is not wholly exact. We
ought rather to compare ourselves to a man condemned to
death who is bravely preparing himself for the ultimate perial-
ty, who is doing everything possible to make a good showing
on the scaffold, and who meanwhile is carried off by a flu epi-
demic. This is what Christian wisdom understands when it
recommends preparing oneself for death as if it could come
at any hour. Thus one hopes to recover it by metamorphosing
it into an expected death. K the meaning of our life becomes
the expectation of death, then when death occurs, it can only
put its seal upon life. This is basically the most positive con-
tent of Heidegger’s “resolute decision” (Entschlossenheit) .
Unfortunately this advice is easier to give than to follow,
not because of a natural weakness in human-reality or be-
cause of an original project of unauthenticity, but because of
death itself. One can, in fact, expect a particular death but
not death. The sleight of hand introduced by -Heidegger is
easy enough to detect. He begins by individualizing the death
of each one of us, by pointing out to us that it is the death of
a person, of an individual, the “only thing which nobody can
do for me.” Then this incomparable individuality which he
has conferred upon death in terms of the Dasein, he uses to
individualize the Dasein itself; it is by projecting itself freely
toward its final possibility that the Dasein will attain authen-
tic existence and wrench itself away from everyday banality
in order to attain the irreplaceable uniqueness of the person.
But there is a circle here. How indeed can one prove that
death has this individuality and the power of conferring it?
Of course, if death is described as my death, I can await it;
it is a possibility which is characterized and distinct. But is '
the death which will overtake me my death?. In the first
place it is perfectly gratuitous to say that “to die is the only
thmg which nobody can do for me.” Or rather there is here an
evident bad faith in the reasoning; if one considers death as
the ultimate subjective possibility, the event which concerns
only the for-itself, then it is evident that nobody can die for
me. But then it follows that none of my possibilities taken
from^ this point of view — ^which is that of the cogito
whether taken in authentic existence or unauthentic can be
684
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
projected by anyone other than me. Nobody can love for me —
if we mean by that to make vows which are my vows, to ex-
perience the emotions (however commonplace they may be)
which are my emotions. And the my here has nothing to do
with a personality won by overcoming everyday banality
(which would allow Heidegger to retort that it is very neces-
sary that I be “free to die,” in order that k love which I ex-
perience should be my love and not the love in me of the
“they”); it refers simply to that selfness which Heidegger
expressly recognizes in every Dasein — whether it exists in the
authentic or unauthentic mode — ^when he decfares that
“Dasein ist je meines.” Thus from this point of view the
most commonplace love is, like death, irreplaceable and
unique; nobody can love for me.
On the other hand, if my acts in the world are consid-
ered from the point of view of their function, their efficacy,
and their result, it is certain that the Other can always
do what I do. If it is a question of making this woman happy,
of safeguarding her life or her freedom, of giving her the
means of finding her salvation, or simply of realLziog a
home with her, of “giving her” children, if that is what we
call loving, then another will be able to love in my place, he
will even be able to love for me. This is the actual meaning of
those sacrifices recounted thousands of times in sentimental
novels which show us the amorous hero longing for the hap-
piness of the woman whom he loves and effacing himself be-
fore his rival because the latter “will be able to love better
than he.” Here the rival is specifically charged to love for,
for to love is defined simply as “to make happy by the love
which is borne to her,” And so it will be with all my con-
duct In this case, however, my death also will fall into this
category. If to die is to die in order to inspire, to bear witness,
for the country, etc., then anybody at all can die in my place —
as in the song in which lots are drawn to see who is to be
eaten. In short there is no personalizing virtue which is pecu-
liar to my death. Quite the contrary, it becomes my death
only if I place myself already in the perspective of sub-
jectivity; it is my subjectivity defined by the pre-reflective
cogito which makes of my death a subjective irreplaceable,
and not death which woidd give an irreplaceable selfness to
my for-itself. In this case death can not be characterized; for
It is death as my death, and consequently its essential struc-
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
685
ture as death is not sufficient to make of it that personalized
and qualified event which one can waft for. ^ ,
Furthermore death can not be awaited unless it is very pre-
cisely designated as tny condemnation to death (the execution
which will take place in eight days, the issue of my illness,
which I know to be immanent and ruthless, etc.), for it is
nothing but the revelation of the absurdity of every expecta-
tion even though it be the expectation of death itself. To
begin with, we must carefully distinguish between two mean-
ings of the verb “expect” which are continually confused: to
expect death is not to wait for death.^® We can “wait for” only
a determined event which equally determined processes are in
the act of realizing. I can wait for the arrival of the train from
Chartres because I know that it has left the station of Char-
tres and that each turn of the wheels brings it closer to the
station at Paris. Of course the train can be late; an accident
even can happen. But the fact remains that the process itself
by which the entrance into the station will be realized is “un-
der way”; and the phenomena which can delay or prevent this
entrance into the station mean here simply that the process is
only a relatively closed, relatively isolated system and that it
is in fact immersed in a universe with a “fibrous structure,”
as Meyerson put it Thus I can say that I am waiting for
Pierre and that “I expect that his train is late.” But in the same
way the possibility of my death means only that I am bio-
logically only a relatively closed, relatively isolated system; it
indicates only the fact that my body belongs to the totality of
existents. It is of the same type as the probable delay of
trains, not of the type of Pierre’s arrival. It stands with the
unforeseen, unexpected impediment which we must always
take into account even while it preserves its specific character
as unexpected, the impediment which one can not wait for
because it is itself .lost in the undetermined. Indeed even if we
admit that the factors are strictly conditioned, which is not
even proved and which requires therefore a metaphysical
option, still their number is infinite and their implications in-
finitely infinite; their ensemble does not constitute a system.
At least from the point of view considered, the envisioned
result — my death — can not be foreseen for any date, and con-
=“Tr. s^tre here is distinguishing between the reflexive and non-refl.
orm of the verb attendre. I am translating s^attendre as “to exnect”
686 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
sequently it can not be waited for. Perhaps while I am peace-
fully writing in this room, the state of the universe is such
that my death has approached considerably closer; but per-
haps, on the contrary, it has just been considerably removed.
For example, if I am waiting for a mobilixation order, I can
consider that my death is imminent — i.e,, that the chances of
an imminent death are considerably increased; but it can
happen that at the same moment an international conference
is being held in secret and that it has discovered a way of
prolonging the peace.
Thus I can not say that the minute which is passing is bring-
ing death closer to me. It is true that death is coming to me
if I consider very broadly that my life is limited. But within
these very elastic limits (I can die at the age of a hundred or
at thirty-seven, tomorrow) I can not know whether this end is
coming closer to me or being removed farther from me. This
is because there is a considerable difference in quality between
death at the limit of old age and sudden death which annihi-
lates us at the prime of life or in youth. To wait for the for-
mer is to accept the fact that life is a limited enterprise; it is
one way among others of choosing finitude and electing our
ends on the foundation of jSnitude. To wait for the second
would be to wait with the idea that my life is an enterprise
which is lacking. If only deaths from old age existed (or
deaths by explicit condemnation), then I could wait for my
death. But the unique quality of death is the fact that it can
always before the end surprise those who wait for it at such -
and such a date. And while death from old age can be con- -
fused with the finitude of our choice and consequently can
be lived as the resolved chord of our life (we are given a task
and we are given time to accomplish it), sudden death, on
the contrary, is such that it can in no way be waited for.
Sudden death is undetermined and by definition can not be
waited for at any date; it always, in fact, includes the possi-
bility that we shall die in surprise before the awaited date
and consequently that our waiting may be, qua waiting, a
deception or that we shall survive beyond this date; in the
latter case since we were only this waiting, we shall outlive
ourselves.
Moreover as the sudden death is qualitatively different
from the other only to the extent that we live one or the other
biologically (that is, from the point of view of the universe
they differ in no way as to their causes and the factors which
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM - 687
determine them) the indetermination of the one actually is
reflected in the other. This means that
death from old age only blindly or m bad faith. We have, m
fact every chance of dying before we have, accomplished our
S the other hand, of oufliving it. There is therefore
a very slim chance that our death will be presented to us as
that of Sophocles was, for example, m the manner of a re-
solved chord. And if it is only chance which decides the char-
acter of our death and therefore of our life, then even the
death which most resembles the end of a melody can not be
waited for as such; luck by determining it for me removes
from it any character as an harmonious end. An end of a
melody in order to confer its meaning on the melody must
emanate from the melody itself. A death like that of Sophocles
will therefore resemble a resolved chord but will not be one,
just as the group of letters formed by the falling of alphabet
blocks will perhaps resemble a word but will not be one. Thus
this perpetual appearance of chance at the heart of my proj-
ects can not be apprehended as my possibility but, on the
contrary, as the nihilation of all my possibilities, a nihilation
which itself is no longer a part of my possibilities. Thus death
is not my possibility of no longer realizing a presence in the
world but rather an always possible nihilation of my possibles
which is outside my possibilities.
This can be expressed in a slightly different way if we
approach the problem from the consideration of meanings.
Human reality is meaningful, as we know. This means that
human reality makes known to itself what it is by means of
that which is not, or if you prefer, that it is to come to itself.
If therefore it is perpetually engaged in its own future, this
compels us to say that it waits for the confirmation of this
future. As future, in fact, that which is to come is pre-out-
lined by a present which will be; one puts oneself in the
hands of this present which alone, by virtue of being present,
IS to be able to confirm or invalidate the pre-outlined mean-
ing which I am. As this present will be itself a free recovery
M ^ ^ future, we shall not be
e to determine it but only to project it and wait for it. The
meaning of my actual conduct is the reprimand which I wish
offpnripH ^ particular person who has seriously
»rba reprimand win
whefterThe stammerings and
ther the meaning of my present conduct wUl pot be trans-
688
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
formed in the past? Freedom limits freedom; the past derives
its meaning from the present. This, as we have shown, ex-
plains the paradox that our actual conduct is both totally
translucent (the pre-reflective cogito) and at the same time
totally hidden by a free determination which we must wait for.
The adolescent is perfectly conscious of the mystic sense of his
conduct, and at the same time he must entrust himself to all
his future in order to determine whether he is in the process
of “passing through a crisis of puberty” or of engaging him-
self in earnest in the way of devotion.
Thus our further freedom, inasmuch as it is not our
actual possibility but the foundation of possibilities which we
are not yet, constitutes as a sort of opacity in full translucency
something like what Barr^s called “the mystery in broad day-
light” Hence this necessity for us to wait for ourselves. Our
life is only a long wmting: first a waiting for the realization
of our ends (to be engaged in an undertaking is to wait for
its outcome) and especially a waiting for ourselves (even if
This undertaking is realized, even if I am able to make myself
loved, to obtain this distinction, this favor, it remains for me
to determine the place, the meaning, and the value of this very
enterprise in my life) . This does not stem from a contingent
lack in human “nature,” from a nervousness which would pre-
vent us from limiting ourselves to the present and which
could be corrected by practice, but rather from the very nature
of the for-itself which “is” to the extent that it temporalizes
itself. Thus it is necessary to consider our life as being made
up not only of waitings but of waitings which themselves
wait for waitings. There we have the very structure of self-
ness: to be oneself is to come to oneself. These waitings
evidently all include a reference to a final term which would
be waited for without waiting for anything more. A repose
which would be being and no longer a waiting for being. The
whole series is suspended from this final term which on
principle is never given and which is the value of our being—
that is, evidently, a plenitude of the type “in-itself-for-it-
self.” By means of this final term the recovery of our past
would be made once and for all. We should know for always
whether a particular youthful experience had been fruitful or
ill-stored, whether a particular crisis of puberty was a caprice
or a real pre-formation of my later engagements; the curve of
our life would be fixed forever. In short, the account would be
closed. Christians have tried to take death as this final term.
689
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
The Reverend Father Boisselot in a private conversation with
me gave me to understand that the “Last Judgment was pre-
cisely this closing of the account which renders one unable
any longer to recover his stroke and which makes one finally
be what one has been — irremediably. ^
But there is an error here analogous to that which we
pointed out earlier in connection with Leibniz although it is ^
put at the other end of existence. For Leibniz we are free
since our acts derive from our essence. Yet the single fact that
our essence has not been chosen by us shows that all this free-
dom in particulars actually covers over a total slavery. God
chose Adam’s essence. Conversely if it is the closing of the
account which gives our life its meaning and its value, then
it is of little importance that all the acts of which the web of
our life is made have been free; the very meaning of them
escapes us if we do not ourselves choose the moment at which
the account will be closed. This has been clearly perceived by
the free-thinking author of an anecdote echoed in the work
of Diderot. Two brothers appeared at the divine tribunal on
the Day of Judgment. The first said to God, “Why did you
make me die so young?” And God said, “In order to save you.
If you had lived longer, you would have committed a crime
as your brother did.” Then the brother in turn asked, “Why
did you make me die so old?” If death is not the free deter-
mination of our • being, it can not complete our life. If
one minute more or less may perhaps change everything and if
this minute is added to or removed from my account, then
even admitting that I am free to use my life, the meaning of
my life escapes me. Now the Christian death comes from
God. He chooses our hour, and in a general way 1 know
clearly that even if it is I who by temporalizing myself cause
there to be minutes and hours in general, still the minute of
my death is not fixed by me; the sequences of the universe de-
termine it.
If this is the case, we can no longer even say that death
confers a meaning on life from the outside; a meaning can
come only from subjectivity. Since death does not appear
on the foundation of our freedom, it can only remove all
meanms from life. If I am a waiting for waitings for wait-
ng^ and if suddenly the object of my final waiting and the
ne who awaits it are suppressed, the waiting takes on
ctrospectively the character of absurdity. For exSiNe
young man has lived for thirty years in the expectadon
690
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
of becoming a great writer, but this waiting itself is not
enough; it becomes a vain and senseless obstinacy or a pro-
found comprehension of his value according to the books
which he writes. His first book has appeared, but by itself
what does it mean? It is the book of a beginner. Let us
admit that it is good; still it gets its meaning through the
future. If it is unique, it is at once inauguration and testa-
ment. He has only one book to write; he is limited and cut
off by his work; he will not be “a great writer.” If the novel
is one in a mediocre series, it is an “accident.” If it is fol-
lowed by other better books, it can classify its author in the
first rank. But exactly at this point death strikes the author—
at the very moment when he was anxiously testing himself
to find out “whether he had the stuff” to write another
work, at the moment when he was stdl expecting to become
a great writer. This is enough to cause everything to fall
into the undetermined: I can not say that the dead writer is
the author of a single book (in the sense that he would
have had only one book to write) nor that he would have
written several (since in fact only one has appeared) . I can say
nothing. Suppose that Balzac had died before Les Chouans;
he would remain the author of some execrable novels of
intrigue. But suddenly the very expectation which this
young man was, this expectation of being a great man,
loses any kind of meaning; it is neither an obstinate and
egotistic^ blindness nor the true sense of his own value
since nothing shall ever decide it It would be useless indeed to
try to decide it by considering the sacrifices which he made
to his art, the obscure and hard,' life which he Was willing
to lead; just as many mediocre figures have had the strength
to make comparable sacrifices. On the contrary, the final
value of this conduct remains forever in suspense; or if you
prefer, the ensemble (particular kinds of conduct, expectations,
values) falls suddenly into the absurd. Thus death is never
that which gives life its meanings; it is, on the contrary, that
which on principle removes all meaning from life. If we
must die, then our life has rio meaning because its problems
receive no solution and because the very meaning of the
problems remains undetermined.
It would be in vain for us to resort to suicide in order to
escape this necessity. Suicide can not be considered as an
end of life for which I should be the unique foundation.
Since it , is an act of my Iffe, indeed, it itself requires a
^ nolNG: FREEDOM
being and DOIN
meaning «Wch fy f JStd &ture. ’Thu^/i
last act of niy > ^ escape death, or if « -mjjj
totally undetermined. If 1 cowardice? WUl
shall I not judge later solutions were possible?
the outcome not show me A ^ ^ jny own projects, *ey
But since these soluuons can be only . ^^tch
SU‘’C?&to\esubmerg^^^^^^^^ Bae
These remarks, it wJl b . - ’ j,.jaiy from the consider-
coiiderationofdeathbut.onthecomryy. i ^
Ton of life; is because ta «se«^
whose being being is m qjsuo , there is no
being which always lays fi^"” ‘ ; £or-itself. AVhat then
placi for death i».*" to toth if it is not the
could be the meanmg of a wai § ^ would reduce
waiting for an
all waiting to the absurd, self.destructive, for it would
A waiting for denth,;"°-"d be , p,rtic-
be the negation of all ,Lj martyrdom, heroism)
ular death is comprehensible ^uicid^ mnr^ undetermined
but n^. the proiect toward my dem^^^^^
possibdity of no long to 8 P -^1 projects.
r'bemy' peculiar possibiiity, it can no.
even be one of as it can be revealed.to me, is
nor'^Snra?:^’ po“iS:“ihaation of my possibles,
a nihilation outside my possibilities. It is ““i ° ^ gjj”jbe
ect which destroys aU projects and which ,
impossible destruction of my expectaUons. It is ^so the
triumph of the point of view of the Other over the pomt
S view which lam toward myself This is “ss ^
Malraux means when in I’Espoir he says of death that it
“transforms life into destiny.” Death, m fact, is only on its
negative side the nihilation of my possibilities, since indeed
I am my possibilities only through the nihilaUon of bemg-
in-itself which I have to be, death as the nAdation of a
nihilation is a positing of my being as in-itself m the sense
in which for Hegel the negation of a negation is an affirma-
tion. So long as the for-itself is "m life” it surpasses its past
toward its future, and the past is that which ,the for-itself
- has to be. When the for-itself “ceases to live, this past
is not thereby abolished. The disappearance of the nihilating
692
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
being does not touch that part of its being which is of the
type of the in-itself; it is engulfed in the in-itself. My whole
life is. This means not that it is an harmonious totality but
that it has ceased to be its own suspense and that it can no
longer change itself by the simple consciousness which it
has of itself. Quite the contrary, the meaning of any phenom-
enon whatsoever in that life is henceforth fixed not by itself
but by this open totality which is the arrested life. This
meaning in the primary and fundamental sense is an absence
of meaning, as we have seen. But in a secondary and derived
sense thousands of shimmering, iridescent relative meanmgs
can come into play upon this fundamental absurdity of a
“dead” life.
For example, whatever may have been its ultimate vanity,
the fact remains that Sophocles’ life was happy, that Balzac’s
life was prodigiously industrious, etc. Naturally these general
qualifications can be made tighter; we can risk a descrip-
tion, an analysis, along with a narration of this life. We
shall obtain more distinct characteristics; for example, we shall
be able to speak of a particular dead woman in the same way
as Mauriac speaks of one of his heroines when he says that
she lived in “prudent desperation.” We shall be able to
grasp the meaning of Pascal’s “soul” (/.e., of his inward
“life”) as “magnificent and bitter” as Nietzsche described it.
We can go on to qualify a particular episode as “cowardly” or
“tactless” without, however, ever losing sight of the fact that
only the contingent arrest pf this “being-in-perpetual-suspense”
which is the living for-itself allows us on the foimdation of a
radical absurdity to confer a relative meaning on the episode
considered, and that this meaning is an essentially provisory
meaning, the provisory quality of which has accidentally passed
into the definitive. But these various explanations of the mean-
ing of Pierre’s life — ^when it was Pierre himself who effected
them in his own life — ^resulted in changing the meaning and
the orientation; for every description of one’s own life when it
is attempted by the for-itself is a project of the self beyond this
life. And as the altering project is by the same token bound to
life which it alters, it is Pierre’s own life which metamorphoses
its meaning by continually temporalizing itself. Now that
his life is dead, only the memory of the Other can prevent
Pierre’s life from shriveling up in its plenitude in-itself
by. cutting all its moorings-with the present
The unique characteristic of a dead life is that it is a life
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
693
of which the Other makes himself the guardian. This does
not mean simply that the Other preserves the life of the
“deceased” by effecting an explicit, cognitive reconstruction
of it. Quite the contrary, such a reconstruction is only one or
the possible attitudes of the Other in relation to the dead
life; consequently the character of a “reconstructed life
(in the midst of the family through the memories ^ of
relatives, in the historic environment) is a particular destiny
which is going to mark some lives to the exclusion of others.
The necessary result is that the opposite quality-— “a life fall-
en into oblivion” — also represents a specific destiny capable
of description, one which comes to certain lives again^ in
terms of the Other. To be forgotten is to be made the object
of an attitude of another, and of an implicit decision on the
part of the Other. To be forgotten is, in fact, to be resolutely
apprehended forever as one element dissolved into a mass
(the “great feudal lords of the thirteenth century,” the
“bourgeois Whigs” of the eighteenth, the “Soviet officials,”
etc.)\ it is in no way to be annihilated, but it is to lose
one’s personal existence in order to be constituted with others
in a collective existence.
This shows us clearly what we hoped to prove: it is that
the Other can not be first without any contact with the dead
so as to decide subsequently (or 'so that circumstances may
decide) that he will have this or that relation with certain
particular dead (those whom he has known while they
were ^ve, the “famous dead,” etc.). In reality the relation
with the dead — with all the dead — is an essential structure
of the fundamental relation which we have called “being-for-
others.” its upsurge into being, the for-itself must assume a
position in relation to the dead; his initial project organizes
them in large. anonymous masses or as distinct individualities;
And for these collective masses as for these, individualities
he determines their removal or their absolute proximity
he unfolds temporal distances between them and himself
by temporalizing himself just as he unfolds spatial distances
m terms of his surroundings. While making himself
^own to himself through his end he decides the pecufiar
importance of the extinct coUectivities or individualities
, A parhcular group which will be strictly anonymous aS
amoyhous for Pierre wiU be specific and structured for me*
another, purely uniform for me, will for Jean effect the
ppearance of its component individuals. Byzantium, Rome
694 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Athens, the second Crusade, the Convention, as many
immense necropoleis as I can see from near or far, from
casual observation or careful scrutiny according to the posi-
tion which I take which I “am.” It is not impossible (pro-
vided one understands this properly) to define a “person”
by his dead — i.e., by the areas of individualization or of
collectivization which he has determined in the necropolis,
by the roads and pathways which he has traced, by the infor-
mation which he has decided to get for himself, by the
“roots” which he has put down there.
Of course the dead choose us, but it is necessary first that
we have chosen them. We find here again the original re-
lation which binds facticity to freedom: we choose our own-
attitude toward the dead, but it is not possible for us not to
choose an attitude. Indifference with respect to the dead is a
perfectly possible attitude (examples of it will be found among
the heimatlos, among certain revolutionaries, or among in-
dividualists). But this indifference — which consists of mak-
ing the dead “die again” — is one conduct among others with
respect to them. Thus by its very facticity, the for-itself ” is
thrown into, full “responsibility” with respect to the dead;
it is obliged to decide freely the fate of the dead. In partic-
ular, when it is a question of the dead who surround us,
it is not possible for us not to decide: — explicitly or implic-
itly — the fate of their enterprises; this is obvious when it is
a question of the son who continues his father’s business
or the disciple who continues the school and the teachings
of his master. But although the bond is less clearly visible
in a good number of circumstances, it is there also in every
case in which the dead and the living belong to the same
historical and concrete collectivity. It is I, it is the men
of my generation who decide the meaning of the efforts and
the enterprises of the preceding generation whether we
resume and continue their social and political attempts,
or whether we realize a decisive rupture and throw the dead
back into inefficacy. As we have seen, it is the America of
1917 which decides the value and the meaning of the deeds
of Lafayette.
Thus from this point of view we can see clearly the dif-
ference between life and death: life decides its own mean-
ing because it is always in suspense; it possesses essentially a
power of self-criticism and self-metamorphosis which cause
rt to define itself as a “not-yet” or, if you like, makes it be as
695
BEING AND DOINGr FREEDOM
the changing of what it is. The dead Me does not
cease to change, and yet it is all done. This means that for it
the chips are down and that it will henceforth undergo its
changes without being in any way responsible for them. For
this life it is not a question only of an arbitrary and definitive
totalization. In addition there is a radical transformation: noth-
ing more can happen to it inwardlyj it is entirely closed, notli-
ing more can be made to enter there; but its meaning does not
cease to be modified from the outside. Until the death of this
apostle of peace the meaning of his enterprises (as folly or ^
a profound sense of the truth of things, as successful or a fail-
ure) was in his own hands. “So long as I am here, there
will not be any war.” But to the extent that this meaning sur-
passes the limits of a simple individuality, to the extent that
the person makes himself known to himself through an objec-
tive situation to be realized (the peace in Europe) , death repre-
sents a total dispossession; it is the Other who dispossesses
the Apostle of peace of the very meaning of his efforts and
therefore of his being, for the Other despite himself and by
his very upsurge undertakes to transform into failure or suc-
cess, into folly or an intuition of genius the very enterprise by
which the person made himself known to himself and which
he was in his being.
Thus the very existence of death alienates us wholly in
our own life to the advantage of the Other. To be dead is to
be a prey for the living. This means therefore that the one
who tries to grasp the meaning of his future death must dis-
cover himself as the future prey of others. We have here there-
fore a case of alienation which we did not consider in the
section of this work which we devoted to the For-others. The
alienations which we studied there, in fact, were those which
we could nihUate by transforming the Other into a transcen-
dence-transcended, just as we could nihil ate our outside by
the absolute and subjective positing of our freedom. So long
as I live I can escape what I am. for the Other by revealing
to myself by my freely posited ends that I am nothing and
that I make myself be what I am; so long as I live, I can give
the he to what others discover in me, by projecting myself
^eady toward other ends and in every instance by revealing
toat my dimension of being-for-myself is incommensurable
with my dimension of being-for-others. Thus ceaselessly I
696 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
longs to neither the one nor the other of these modes of
being. But the fact of death without being precisely allied to
either of the adversaries in this same combat gives the &al
victory to the point of view of the Other by transferring the
combat and the prize to another level — that is, by suddenly
suppressing one of the combatants. In this sense to die is to be
condemned no matter what ephemeral victory one has won
over the Other; even if one has made use of the Other to
“sculpture one’s own statue,” to die is to exist' only through
the Other, and to owe to him one’s meaning and the very
meaning of one’s victory.
If we share the realist views which we presented in Part
Three, we must recognize that my existence after death is not
the simple spectral survival “in the Other’s consciousness” of
simple representations (images, memories, etc.) concerning
me. My being-for-others is a real being. If it remains in the
hands of the Other like a coat which I leave to him after my
disappearance, this is by virtue of a real dimension of my being
— a dimension which has become my unique dimension — and
not in the form of an unsubstantial specter. Richelieu, Louis
XV, my grandfather are by no means the simple sum of my
memories, nor even the sum of the memories or the pieces of
knowledge of all those who have heard of them; they are ob-
jective and opaque beings which are reduced to the single
dimension of exteriority. In this capacity they will pursue
their history in the human world, but. they will never be
more than transcendences-transcended in the midst of the
world. Thus not only does death disarm my waiting by defin-
itively removing the waiting and by abandoning in indeter-
mination the realization of the ends which make known to me
what I am — but again it confers a meaning from the outside
on everything which I live in subjectivity. Death reapprehends
all this subjective which while it “lived” defended itself
against exteriorization, and death deprives it of all, subjective
meaning in order to hand it over to any objective meaning
which the Other is pleased to give to it. Nevertheless it
should be noted that this “destiny” thus conferred on my
life remains also in suspense, in reprieve. The reply to the
question, “What will be the definitive historical destiny of
Robespierre?” depends on the reply to this preliminary ques-
tion: “Does history have a meaning?” That is, “Is history
completed or only terminated?" This question is not resolved.
Perhaps it is insolvable since all answers which can be made
BEING AND DOING; FREEDOM 697
to it (including the answer of idealism: “The history of
Egypt is the history of Egyptology”) are themselves his-
torical.
Thus by admitting that my death can be revealed m my
life, we see that it can not be a pure arresting of my subjectiy-
ity; for such an arresting, since it is an inner event of
subjectivity, could finally be concerned only with the subjec-
tivity. If it is true that dogmatic realism was wrong in view-
ing death as the state of death — i.e., as a transcendent to life
—the" fact remains that death such that I can discover it as
mine necessarily engages something other than myself. In fact
in so far as it is the always possible nihilation of my possibles,
it is outside my possibilities and therefore I can not wait for
it; that is, I can not thrust myself toward it as toward one of
my possibilities. Death can not therefore belong to the on-
tological structure of the for-itself. In so far as it is the
triumph of the Other over me, it refers to a fact, fundamental
to be sure, but totally contingent as we have seen, a fact which
is the Other’s existence. We should not know this death if the
Other did not exist; it could not be revealed to us, nor could
it be constituted as the metamorphosis of our being into a
destiny; it would be in fact the simultaneous disappearance of
the for-itself and of the world, of the subjective, and of the
objective, of the meaningful and of all meanings. If death can
to a certain extent be revealed to us as the metamorphosis of
these particular meanings which are my meanings, it is owing
to the fact of the existence of a meaningful Other which
guarantees the location of meanings and of signs. It is be-
cause of the Other that my death is the fact that as a sub-
jectivity I fall out of the world and it is not the annihilation
of both consciousness and the world. There is then an undeni-
able and fundamental character of fact — i.e., a radical contin-
gency — ^in death as in the Other’s existence. This contingency
at once puts death out of reach of all ontological conjectures.
And to contemplate my life by considering it in terms of
death would be to contemplate my subjectivity by adopting
with regard to it the Other’s point of view. We have seen
that this is not possible.
Thus we must conclude in opposition to Heidegger that
death, far from being my peculiar possibility, is a contingent
fact which as such on principle escapes me and originally be-
longs to my facticity. I can neither discover my death nor wait
for it nor adopt an attitude toward it, for it is that which is
698 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
revealed as undiscoverable, that which disarms all waiting,
that which slips into all attitudes (and particularly into those
which are assumed with respect to death) so as to transform
them into externalized and fixed conducts whose meaning is
forever entrusted to others and not to ourselves. Death is a
pure fact as is birth; it comes to us from outside and it trans-
forms us into the outside. At bottom it is in no way distin-
guished from birth, and it is the identity of birth and death
that we call facticity.
Does this mean that death marks the limits of our free-
dom? In renouncing Heidegger’s being-unto-death, have we
abandoned forever the possibility of freely giving to our being
a meaning for which we are responsible?
Quite the contrary. As it seems to us, death by being
revealed to us as it really is frees us wholly from its so-called
constraint. This will be clearer if we but reflect on the matter.
First, however, it will be well to separate radically the
two usually combined ideas of death and finitude. Ordinarily
the belief seems to be that it is' death which constitutes our
finitude and which reveals it to us. From this combination it
results that death takes on the shape of an ontological necessi-
ty and that finitude, on the other hand, borrows from death
its contingent character. Heidegger in particular seems to
have based his whole theory of Sein-zum-Tode on the strict
identification of death and finitude. In the same way Mal-
raux, when he tells us that death reveals to us the uniqueness
of life, seems to hold that it is just because we die that we
are powerless to recover our stroke and are therefore finite.
But if we consider the matter a little more closely, we detect
their error: death is a contingent fact which belongs to factic-
ity; finitude is an ontological structure of the for-itself which
determines freedom and exists only in and through the
free project of the end which makes my being known to
me. In other words human reality would remain finite even
if it were immortal, because it makes itself finite by choosing
itself as human. To be finite,- in fact, is to choose oneself —
that is, to make known to oneself what one is by projecting
oneself toward one possible to the exclusion of others. The
very act of freedom is therefore the assumption and creation
of finitude. If I make myself, I make myself finite and hence
my life is unique. Consequently even if I were immortal, it
would be forbidden me to “recover my stroke”; it is the irre-
versibility of temporality which forbids me, and this irreversi-
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
699
bility is nothing but the peculiar character of a freedom which
temporalizes itself. Of course if I am immortal and have had
to reject the possible B in order to realize the possible A, the
opportunity may be offered me later to realize the refused pos-
sible. But by the very fact that this opportunity will be pre-
sented after the refused opportunity, it will not be the, same,
and consequently I shall for all eternity have made myself
finite by irremediably rejecting the first opportunity. From this
point of view, the immortal man like the mortal is born several
and makes himself one. Even if one is temporally indefi-
nite— /.e., without limits— one’s “life” will be nevertheless
finite in its very being because it makes itself unique. Death
has nothing to do with this. Death occurs “within time,” and
human-reality by revealing to itself its unique fimtude does
not thereby discover its mortality.
Thus death is in no way an ontological structure of my
being, at least not in so far as my being is for itself; it is the
‘Other who is mortal in his being. There is no place for death
in being-for-itself; it can neither wait for death nor realize it
nor project itself toward it; death is in no way the foundation
of the finitude of the for-itself. In a general way death can
neither be founded from within like the project of original
freedom, nor can it be received from the outside as a quality
by the for-itself. What then is death? Nothing but a certain
aspect of facticity and of being-for-others — i.e., no thin g other
than the given. It is absurd that we are born; it is absurd that
we die. On the other hand, this absurdity is presented as the
permanent alienation of my being-possibility which is no
longer my possibility but that of the Other. It is therefore an
external and factual limit of my subjectivity!
But do we not recognize at t^ point the description which
we attempted in the preceding section? This factual limit
which on the one hand we must affirm since nothing pene-
trates us from outside and since in one sense it is very
necessary that we experience death if we are to be able
even to name it, this factual limit which, on the other hand
is never encountered by the for-itself since it does not enter
mto the for-itself save as the indefinite permanence of its beine-
for-others — what is this limit if not precisely one of the un~
^ ^ ^ synthetic aspect for our reverse
side. Mortal represents the present being which I am for the
uther; dead represents the future meaning of my actual for
Itaelf for the Other. We are dealmg therefore S a plrm^
700 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
nent limit of my projects; and as such this limit is to be
assumed. It is therefore an exteriority which remains exteri-
ority even in and through the attempt of the for-itself to
realize it. It is what we defined above as the unrealizable to be
realized. There is basically no difference between the choice by
which freedom assumes its death as the inapprehensible and
inconceivable limit of its subjectivity and that by which It
chooses to be a freedom limited by the fact of the Other's
freedom. Thus death is not my possibility in the sense pre-
viously defined; it is a situation-limit as the chosen and fugi-
tive reverse side of my choice. It is not my possible in the
sense that it would be my own end which would make known
to me my being. But due to the fact that it is an unavoidable
necessity of existing elsewhere as an outside and an in-itself, it
is interiorized as “ultimate”; that is, as a thematic meaning of
the hierarchical possibles, a meaning out of reach.
Thus death haunts me at the very heart of each of my
projects as their inevitable reverse side. But precisely because
this “reverse” is to be assumed not as my possibility but as
the possibility that there are for me no longer any possibilities,
it does not penetrate me. The freedom which is my freedom
remains total and infinite. Death is not an obstacle to my proj-
ects; it is only a destiny of these projects elsewhere. And this
is not because death does not limit my freedom but because
freedom never encounters this limit. I am not “free to die,”
but I am a free mortal. Since death escapes my projects be-
cause it is unrealizable, I myself escape death in my very proj-
ect. Since death is always beyond my subjectivity, there is
no place for it in my subjectivity. This subjectivity does not
affirm itself against death but independently of it although
this affirmation is immediately alienated. Therefore we can
neither think of death nor wait for it nor arm ourselves
against it; but also our projects as projects are independent
of death — not because of our blindness, as the Christian says,
but on principle. And although there are innumerable
possible attitudes with which we may confront this unrealiz-
able which “is thrown into the bargain” to be realized, there is
no place for classifying these attitudes as authentic or unau-
thentic since our death is always thrown into the bargain.
These various descriptions relating to my place, my
past, my environment, my death, and my fellowman do not
claim to be exhaustive or even detailed. Their aim is sim-
ply to grant us a clearer conception of the “situation.”
,BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM 701
Thanks to these descriptions, it is going to be possible for ns
more preckely this “being-m-situaUon” which
characterizes the For-itself in so far as it is responsible
for its manner of being without being the foundation of its
(f) I am an existent in the midst of other existents.
But I can not “realize” this existence in the midst of others;
I can not apprehend as objects the existents which surround me
nor apprehend myself as a surrounded existence nor even
give a meaning to this notion of “in the midst of” except by
choosing myself — ^not in my being but in my manner of
being. Ihe choice of this end is the choice of what is not-^yetz
existing. My position in the midst of the world is defined by
the.relation between the instrumental utility or adversity in the
realities which surround me and my own facticity; that is,
the discovery of the dangers which I risk in the world, of
the obstacles which I can encounter there, the aid which can
be offered me, all in the light of a radical nihilation of my-
self and of a radical, internal negation of the in-itself and
all effected from the point of view of a freely posited end.
This is what we mean by the situatior}.
(2) The situation exists only in correlation with the sur-
passing of the given toward an end. It is the way in which' the
given which I am and the given which I am not are revealed
to the For-itself which I am in the mode of not-being it.
When we speak of situation therefore we are speaking of a
“position apprehended by the For-itself which is in situation.”
It is impossible to consider a situation from the outside; it is
fixed in a form in itself. Consequently the situation can not
be called either objective or subjective although the partial
structures of this situation (the cup which I use, the table
on which I lean, etc.) can and must be strictly objective.
The situation can not be subjective, for it is neither' the
sum nor the unity of the impressions which things make on
us. It is the things themselves and myself among things; for
my upsurge into the world as the pure nihilation of beins
hM no other result but to cause there to be things, and it adds
not/ung. In this aspect the situation betrays my facticitv- that
-cti
-SJalnfdteT ^
But neither can the situation be objective in
that It would be a pure given which the subject woSd estab!
702 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
lish without being in any way engaged in the system thus
constituted. In fact the situation by the very meaning of the
given (a meaning without which there would not even be
any given) reflects to the for-ilself its freedom. If the sit-
uation is neither subjective nor objective, this is because it
does not constitute a knowledge nor even an affective com-
prehension of the state of the world by a subject The situation
is a relation of being between a for-itself and the in-itself
which the for-itself nihilates. The situation is the whole
subject (he is nothing but his situation) and it is also the
whole “thing” (there is never anything more than things).
The situation is the subject illuminating things by his very
surpassing, if you like; it is things referring to the subject
his own image. It is the total facticity, the absolute contingency,
of the world, of my birth, of my place, of my past, of my
environment, of the fact of my fellowman — and it is my
freedom without limits as that which causes there to be
for me a facticity. It is this dusty, ascending road, this burn-
ing thirst which I have, the refusal of these people to give
me an 5 rthing to drink because I do not have any money or
because I am not of their country or of their race; it is my
abandonment in the midst of these hostile populations along
with this fatigue in my body which will perhaps prevent me
from reaching the goal which I had set for myself. But also
it is precisely this goal, not in so far as I clearly and explicitly
formulate it but in so far as it is there everywhere around me
as that which unifies and explains all these facts, that which
organizes them in a totality capable of description instead
of making of them a disordered nightmare.
(3) If the for-itself is nothing other than its situation, then
it follows that being-in-situation defines human reality by
accounting both for its being-there and for its being-beyond.
Human reality is indeed the being which is always be-
yond its being-there. And the situation is the organized
totality of the being-there, interpreted and lived in and through
being-beyond. Therefore there is no privileged situation.
We mean by this that there is no situation in which the
given^ would crush beneath its weight the freedom which
constitutes it as such — and that conversely there is no situation
in which the for-itself would be more free than in others.
This must not be understood in the sense of that “inward
freedom” of Bergson’s which Politzer ridiculed in La fin
d’une parade philosophique (The End of a Philosophical
BEING' AND DOING: FREEDOM
FcrMe) and which simply amounted to
Lve the independence of *e imer Me “
chains. When we declare that the slave in ^^ns-is as tree
as his master, we do not mean to speak of a freedom which
would remain undetermined. The -slave in chains is free to
break them: this means that the very meaning of his chains
wUl appear to him in the light of the end which he will
have chosen: to remain a slave or to risk the worst in order
to get rid of his slavery. Of course the slave will not be able
to obtain the wealth and the standard of living of his master;
but these are not the objects of his projects; he' can only
dream of the possession of these treasures, _ 'nie slave’s
facticity is such that the world appears to him with another
countenance and that he has to posit and to resolve different
problems; in particular it is necessary fundamentally to choose
himself on the ground of slavery and thereby to give a
meaning to this obscure constraint. For example, if he
chooses revolt, then slavery, far from being at the start an
obstacle to this revolt, takes on its meaning and its coefficient
of adversity only through the revolt. To be exact, just because
the life of the slave who revolts and dies in the course of this '
revolt is a free life, just because the situation illuminated by a
free project is full and concrete, just because the urgent and
principal problem of this life is “Shall I attain my goal?” —
just because of all this, the situation of the slave can not be
compared with that of the master. Each of them in fact
takes on its meaning only for the for-itself in situation and
in terms of the free choice of its ends. A comparison could
be made only by a third person and consequently it couldl
take place only between two objective forms in the midst of
the world; moreover it could be established only in the
light of a project freely chosen by this third person. There
is no absolute point of view which one can adopt so as to
compare different situations; each person realizes only one
situation— Aw own.
^ ( 4 ) Since the situation is illumined by ends which are
themselves projected only in terms of the being-there
which they illuminate, it is presented as eminently concrete
Ut course it contains and sustmns abstract and universal
structures, but it must be understood as the i 00^^?
which the world turns toward us as ourTiQu^anH
personal chance. We may recall here a fable of Kafka’s- A
rchant comes to plead his case at the castle where a for-
704
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
bidding guard bars the entrance. The merchant does not dare
to go further; he waits and dies still waiting. At the hour of
death he asks the guardian, “How does it happen that I
was the only one waiting?” And the guardian replies, “This
gate was made only for you.” Such is precisely the case with
the for-itself if we may add in addition that each man makes
for himself his own gate. The concreteness of the situation
is expressed particularly by the fact that the for-itself never
aims at ends which are fundamentally abstract and universaL
Of course we shall see in the next chapter that the profound
meaning of the choice is universal and that consequently the
for-itself causes a human-reality to exist as a species. Again
it is necessary to disengage the meaning which is implicit,
and it is for this that we shall use existential psychoanalysis.
Once disengaged the terminal and initial meaning of the
for-itself wiU appear as an Vnselbstdndig which in order
to manifest itself needs a particular kind of concretion.^*
But the end of the for-itself as it is lived and pursued in the
project by which the for-itself surpasses and founds the
real is revealed in its concreteness to the for-itself as a partic-
ular change in the situation which it lives (e.g., to break its
chains, to be King of the Franks, to liberate Poland, to fight
for the proletariat). At first the for-itself will not project
fighting for the proletariat in general but will aim at the
proletariat across a particular concrete group of workers to
which the person belongs. This is due to the fact that the end
illuminates the given only because the end is chosen as the sur-
passing of this given. The for-itself does not arise with a wholly
given end, but by “making” the situation, the for-itself “makes
itself” — and conversely.
(5) Just as the situation is neither objective nor subjec-
tive, so it can be considered neither as the free result of a
freedom nor as the ensemble of the constraints to which
I am subject; it stems from the illumination of the constraint
by freedom which gives to it its meaning as constraint
Among brute existents there can be no connection; it is
freedom which founds the connections by grouping the
exigents into instrumental-complexes; and it is freedom
which projects the reason for the connections — ^that is, its
end. But precisely because I project myself toward an
end across a world of connections, I now meet with sequences,
- with linked series, with complexes, and I must determine to
“C/. the following chapter.
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
705
act according to laws. These laws and the way I make nse of
SlmTcMe the failure or the success of my attempts. But it
ftousTfreedom that legal relations come into the world
Thus freedom enchains itself in the world as a free proj
toward ^ds ^ temporalization. This means that
it is not but that it “makes itself.” It is the situation which
must account for that substantial permanence which we
readily recognize in people (“He has not changed. He
is always the same.”) and which the person experiences
empirically in most cases as being his own. The free per-
severance in a single project does not imply any permanence;
quite the contrary, it is a perpetual renewal of my engage-
jXiQnt — as we have seen. On the other hand, the realities
enveloped and illuminated by a project which develops and
confirms itself present the permanence of the in-itself; and
to the extent that they refer our image of us, they support iis
with their everlastingness; in fact it frequently happens
that we take their permanence for our own. In particular the
permanence of place and environment, of the judgments passed
on us by our fellowmen, of our past — all shape a degraded
image of our perseverance. While I am temporalizing ray-
self, I am always French, a civil servant or a proletarian for
others. This unrealizable has the character of an inv^iable
limit for my situation.
Similarly what we call a person’s temperament or character
but which is nothing but his free project in so far as it is-
' for-the-Other, appears also for the For-itself as an invariable
unrealizable. Alain has perceived correctly that character- is
a vow. When a man says, “I am not easy to please,” he
is entering into a free engagement with his ill-temper, and
by the same token his words are a free interpretation of certain
ambiguous details in his past. In this sense there is no"
character; there is only a project of oneself. But we must
not, however, misunderstand the given aspect of the character.
.It is true that for the Other who apprehends me as the Other-
as-ob]ect, I am ill-tempered, hypocritical or frank, cowardly
or courageous. This aspect is referred to me by the Other’s
character,
which w^ a free- project lived and self-conscious, becomes
n unrealizable ne varietur to be assumed. It depends then
taken W,a respect to the Other and on my perseverance
706 ■ BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
in maintaining this position. So long as I let myself be fasci-
nated by the Other’s look, my character will figtire in my own
eyes as an unrealizable ne varietur^ the substantial permanence
of my being— the kind of thing expressed in such ordinary
everyday remarks as “I am forty-five years old, and I’m not
going to start changing myself today.” The Character often
is what the For-itself tries to recover in order to become the
In-itself-for-itself which it projects being. Nevertheless
it should be noted that this permanence of the past, of the
environment, and of character are not given qualities; ^they
are revealed on things only in correlation with tihe continuity
of my project. For example, when after a war, after a long
exile one finds a particular mountain landscape unchanged,
it would be in vain to hope to found upon the inertia and
apparent permanence of these stones the hope for a renas-
cence of the past. This landscape reveals its permanence only
across a persevering project These mountains have a meaning
inside my situation; in one way or another they shape my
belonging to a nation which is at peace, her own mistress,
one who holds a certain rank in the international hierarchy.
Let me find them again after a defeat and during the occupa-
tion of a part of the national territory, and they can not
offer me the same countenance. This is because I myself
have other projects, because I am engaged differently in the
world.
Finally we have seen that internal upheavals of the
situation because of autonomous changes in the environment
are always to be anticipated. Ihese changes can* never provoke
a change of my project, but on the foundation of my freedom
they can effect a simplification or a cornplication of the
situation. Consequently my initial project will be revealed to
me with ’more or less simplicity. For a person is never either
simple or complex; it is his situation which can be one or
the other. In fact I am nothing but the project of myself
beyond a determined situation, and this project pre-outlines
me in terms of the concrete situation as in addition it illu-
mines the situation in terms of my choice. If therefore the
situation in its ensemble is simplified, even if landslides,
cave-ins, erosions have imprinted upon it a well-marked as-
pect of heavier features with violent contrasts, I shall myself
. be simple, for my choice — ^the choice which I am — ^is an
apprehension of this situation here and can only be simple*
The birth of new complications will have the result of pre*
BEING AND DOING; FREEDOM
707
senting me with a complicated situation beyond which I
shall find myself complicated. This is something which every-
one has been able to establish ifi he has observed with what
almost animal simplicity prisoners of war react following
the extreme simplification of their situation. This simpli-
fication can not modify the meaning of their project; but
on the very foundation of my freedom it causes my environ-
ment to become condensed and uniform and to be consti-
tuted in and through a clearer, more brutal, and more
condensed apprehension of the fundamental ends of the
-captive person. In short we are dealing with an internal
metabolism, not with a global metamorphosis which -would
affect as well the form of the situation. These are, never-
theless, changes which I discover as changes “in my life”—
that is, changes within the unitary compass of a single proj-
ect.
HI. FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY
Although the - considerations which are about to follow
are of interest primarily to the ethicist, it may nevertheless
be^ worthwhile after these descriptions and arguments to
return to the freedom of the for-itself and to try to under-
stand what the fact of this freedom represents for human
destiny.
The essential consequence of our earlier remarks is that
man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the
whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the
world and for himself as a way of being. We are taking the
word “responsibility” in its ordinary sense as “conscious-
ness (of) being the incontestable author of an event or of
an object.” In this sense the responsibility of the for-itself
is overwhelming since he^^ is the one by whom it happens that
there is a world; since he is also the one who makes himr
self be, then whatever may be the situation in which he finds
himself, the for-itself must wholly assume this situation with
its peculiar coefficient of adversity, even though it be in-
supportable. He must assume the situation with the proud
Tr. I am shifting to the personal pronoun here since Sartre is describing
the for-^teelf in concrete personal terms rather than as a metaphysical entity.
Strictly speaking, of course, this is his position throughout, - and the French
"il” is indifferenfly “he” or “it.”
708 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
consciousness of being the author of it, for the very worst
disadvantages or the worst threats which can endanger my
person have meaning only in and through my project;
and it is on the ground of the engagement which I am
that they appear. It is therefore senseless to think of com-
plaming since nothing foreign has decided what we feel,
what we live, or what we are.
-Furthermore this absolute responsibility is not resignation;
it is simply the logical requirement of the consequences of
our freedom. What happens to me happens through me, and I
can neither afEect myself with- it nor revolt against it nor
resign myself to it. Moreover everything which happens to
me is mine. By this we must understand first of all that I am
always equal to what happens to me qua man, for what
happens to a man through other men and through himself
can be only human. The most terrible situations of war,
the worst tortures do not create a non-human state of things;
there is no non-human situation. It is only through fear,
flight, and recourse to magical types of conduct that I shall
decide on the non-human, but this decision is human, and
I shall carry the enthe responsibility for it But in addition
the situation is mine because it is the image of my free choice
of myself, and everything which it presents to me is mine
in that this represents me and symbolizes me. Is it not I who
decide the coefficient of adversity in things and even their
unpredictability by deciding myself?
Thus there are no accidents in a life; a community event
which suddenly bursts forth and involves me in it does not
come from the outside. If I am mobilized in a war, this
war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it. T deserve
it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by
desertion; these ultimate possibles are those which must always
present for us when there is a question of envisaging a
situation. For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it
This^ can be due to inertia, to cowardice in the face of
public opinion, or because I prefer certain other values to
the value of the refusal to join in the war (the good opinion
of my relatives, the honor of my family, etc.). Any way you
look at it, it is a matter of a choice. This choice will be
repeated later on again and again without a break until the
end of the war. Therefore we must agree with the statement
by J. Remains, “In war there are no innocent victims.”"® If
“ J. Romains. Les hommes de bonne volontS. VoL ni: “Prelude h. Verdun.”
BEING AND DOING: FREEDOM
709
therefore I have preferred war to death or to dishonor, every-
thing takes place as if I bore the entire responsibility for
this war. Of course others have declared it, and one might
be tempted perhaps to consider me as a simple accomplice.
But this notion of complicity has only a juridical sense, and
it does not hold here. For it depended on me that for me
and by me this war should not exist, and I have decided that
it does exist. There was no compulsion here, for the com-
pulsion could have got no hold on a freedom. I did not have
any excuse; for as we have said repeatedly in this book, the
peculiar character of human-reality is that it is without excuse.
Therefore it remains for me only to lay claim to this war.
But in addition the war is mine because by the sole fact
that it arises in a situation which I cause to be and that I
can discover it there only by engaging myself for or against
it, I can no longer distinguish at present the choice which
I make of myself from the choice which I make of the war.
To live this war is to choose myself through it and to choose
it through my choice of myself. There can be no question
of considering it as “four years of vacation” or as a “re-
prieve,” as a “recess,” the essential part of 'my responsibil-
ities being elsewhere in my married, family, or professional
life. In this war which I have chosen I choose myself from
day to day, and I make it mine by making myself. If it
is going to be four empty years, then it is I who bear the
responsibility for this.
Finally, as we pointed out earlier, each person is an abso-
lute choice of self from the standpoint of a world of knowl-
edges and of techniques which this choice both assumes and
illumines; each person is an absolute upsurge at an absolute
date and is perfectly unthinkable at another date. It is there-
fore a waste of time to ask what I should have been if
this war had not broken out, for I have chosen myself as
one of the possible meanings of the epoch which impercep-
tibly led to war. I am not distinct from this same epoch;
I could not be transported to another epoch without contra-
diction. Thus I am this war which restricts and limits and
makes comprehensible the period which preceded it. In this
sense we may define more precisely the responsibility of
the for-itself if to the earlier quoted statement, “There are
no innocent victims,” we add the words, “We have the war
we deserve.” Thus, totally free, undistinguishable from the
^ period for which I have chosen to be the meaning, as pro-
710 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
foundly responsible for the war as if I had myself declared
it, unable to live without integrating it in my situation,
engaging myself in it wholly and stamping it with my seal,
I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse;
for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the
weight of the world by myself alone without anything or
any person being able to lighten it.
Yet this responsibility is of a very particular type. Some-
one will say, “I did not ask to be born.” This is a naive
way of throwing greater emphasis on our facticity. 1 am re-
sponsible for everything, in fact, except for my very re-
sponsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being.
Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to
be responsible. I am abandoned in the world, not in the
sense that I might remain abandoned and passive in a hostile
universe like a board floating on the water, but rather in the
sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help,
engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility
without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from
this responsibility for an instant. For I am responsible for
my very desire of fleeing responsibilities. To make myself
passive in the world, to refuse to act upon things and upon
Others is still to choose myself, and suicide is one mode
among others of being-in-the-world. Yet I find an absolute
responsibility for the fact that my facticity (here the fact
of my birth) is directly inapprehensible and even inconceiv-
able, for this fact of my birth never appears as a brute fact but
always across a projective reconstruction of my for-itself. I
arn ashamed of being bom or I am astonished at it or I
rejoice over it, or in attempting to get rid of my life I affirm
that I live and I assume this life as bad. Thus in a certain
sense I choose being bom. This choice itself is integrally
affected with facticity since I am not able not to choose, but
&is facticity in turn will appear only in so far as I surpass
it toward my ends. Thus facticity is everywhere but inappre-
hensible; I never encounter anything except ray responsibility.
That is why I can not ask, “Why was I bom?” or curse the
day of my birth or declare that I did not ask to be bom, for
&ese various attitudes toward my birth — i.e., toward the
fact that I realize a presence in the world — are absolutely
ways of assuming this birth in full respon-
sibility and of making it mine. Here again I encounter only
myself and my projects so that finaUy my abandonment—
<}iiesL ^ in ^^oUy ^ ^^ply ,. ,
Sfion . ZQ such Tr.^^^PonsiijQ^^^^
rr ’^^ibir" ^ for that r
Undej. 5 ® ^f mvT^ ^ its 1 IJ
o^n k^ these ^ ^ ^^xdo- /„ ^^iog /#„ , ■*. ^qj ^
7JJ
sza
aad ^
^ap.
^ bei
?Ppor- ^ tr^in^- in n,. ^ onh. °e cnn^-t y^t
eic,) (nn
■'» Or k . .
Worjd
^^y as
ZQ
a
OUT 5 ,
as
siQce
a
S6.? • c “•/•Si"'' J7’“*i^'ir 5
Til
tbrc
Keaif .?'’>«e^" coj^e S ^
^e a Or ^ "^ZS VPr». .^Z^o
.7“^ as v^e Who^rr a or *zs
ee
' *osf Of
CHAPTER TWO
Doing and Having
I. EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOANALYSIS
If it is true that human reality — as we have attempted to
establish — identifies and defines itself by the ends which it
pursues, then a study and classification of these ends becomes
indispensable. In the preceding chapter we have considered
the For-itself only from the point of view of its free proj-
ect, which is the impulse by which it thrusts itself toward
its end. We should now question this end itself, for it forms
a part of absolute subjectivity and is, in fact, its transcen-
dent, objective limit. Tliis is what empirical psychology has
hmted at by admitting that a“ particular man is defined by
his desires. Here, however, we must be on our guard against
two errors. First, the empirical psychologist, while defining
man by his desires, remains the victim of the illusion of
substance. He views desire as being in man by virtue of
being “contained” by his consciousness, and he believes that
the meaning of the desire is inhereht in the desire itself.
Thus he avoids everything which could evoke the idea of
transcendence. But if I desire a house or a glass of water or
a woman’s body, how could this body, this glass, this piece
of property reside in my desire, and how can my desire be
anything but the consciousness of these objects as desirable?
Let us beware then of considering these desires as little -psy-
chic entities dwelling in consciousness; they are conscious-
712
DOING AND HAVING
713
ness itself in its original projective, transcendent structure,
for consciousness is on principle consciousness of something.
The other error, which fundamentally is closely connected
with the first, consists in considering psychological research
as terminated as soon as the investigator has reached the
concrete ensemble of empirical desires. Thus a man would
be defined by the bundle of drives or tendencies which
empirical observation could establish. Naturally the psycholo-
gist will not always limit himself to making up the sum of
these tendencies; he will want to bring to light their relation-
ship, their agreements and harmonies; he will try to
present the ensemble of desires as a synthetic organization
in which each desire acts on the others and influences them.
A critic, for example, wishing to explain the “psychology”
of Flaubert, will write that he “appeared in his early youth
to know as his normal state, a continual exaltation resulting
from the twofold feeling of his grandiose ambition and
his invincible power. . . . The effervescence of his young
blood was then turned into literary passion as happens about
the eighteenth year in precocious souls who find in the energy
of style or the intensities of fiction some way of escaping
from the need of violent action or of intense feeling, which
torments, them.”^
In this passage there is an effort to reduce the complex
personality of an adolescent to a few basic desires, as the
chemist reduces compound bodies to merely a combination of
simple bodies. The primitive givens will be grandiose ambi-
tion, the need of violent action and of intense feeling; these
elements, when they enter into combination, produce a
permanent exaltation. Then — as Bourget remarks in a few
words which we have not quoted — ^this exaltation, nourished
by numerous well-chosen readings, is going to seek to
delude itself by self-expression in fictions which will appease
it symbolically and channel it There in outline is the genesis
of a literary “temperament.”
Now in the first place such a psychological analysis pro-
ceeds from the postulate that an individual fact is produced
by the intersection of abstract, universal laws. The fact to be
explained — ^which is here the literary disposition of the
young Flaubert — is resolved into a combination of typical
abstract desires such as we meet in “the average adolescent.”
What is concrete here is only their combination; in themselves
*Paul Bourget. Essat de Psychologie contemperalne: G. Flaubert.
714 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
they are only possible patterns. The abstract then^ is by
hypothesis prior to the concrete, and the^ concrete is only
an organization of abstract qualities; the individual is only
the intersection of universal schemata. But — aside from the
logical absurdity of such a postulate — we see clearly in the
example chosen, that it simply fails to explain what makes
the individuality of the . project under consideration. The
fact that “the need to feel intensely,” a universal pattern,
is disguised and channeled into becoming the need to write —
this is not the explanation of the “calling” of Flaubert; on
the contrary, it is what must be explained. Doubtless one
could invoke a thousand circumstances, known to us and
unknown, which have shaped this need to feel into the
need to act. But this is to give up at the start all attempt to
explain and refers the question to the undiscoverable." In
addition this method rejects the pure individual who has
been banished from the pure subjectivity of Flaubert into
the external circumstances of his life. Finally, Flaubert’s
correspondence proves that long before the “crisis of adoles-
cence,” from his earliest childhood, he was tormented by
the need to write.
At each stage in the description just quoted, we meet
with a hiatus. Why did ambition and the feeling of his
power produce in Flaubert exaltation rather than tranquil
waiting or gloomy impatience? Why did this exaltation
express itself specifically in the need to act violently and
feel intensely? Or rather why does this need make a^sudden
appearance by spontaneous generation at the end of the
paragraph? And why does this need instead of seeking to
appease itself in acts of violence, by amorous adventures,
or in debauch, choose precisely to satisfy itself symbolically?
And why does Flaubert turn to writing rather than to paint-
ing or music for this symbolic satisfaction; he could just as
well not resort to the artistic field at all (there is also mysti-
cism, for example). “I could have been a great actor,” wrote
Flaubert somewhere. Why did he not try to be one? In a
word, we have understood nothing; we have seen a* succes-
sion of accidental happenings, of desire springing forth fully
armed, one from the other, with no possibility for us to
grasp their genesis. The transitions, the becomings, the trans-
® Since Flaubert’s adolescence, so far as we can know it, offers us nothing
specific in this connection, we must suppose the action of imponderable facts
which on principle escape the critic.
715
DOING AND HAVING
formations, have been carefuUy veiled from us, and we have
been limited to putting order into the succession by invok-
ing empirically established but literally uninteUigible se-
quences (the need to act preceding in the adolescent the need
to write). . *
Yet this is called psychology! Open any biography at
random, and this is the kind of description which you will
find more or less interspersed with accounts of external events
and allusions to the great explanatory idols of our epoch
heredity, education, environment, physiological constitution.
Occasionally, in the better works the connection established
between antecedent arid consequent or between two con-
comitant desires and their reciprocal action is not conceived
merely as a type of regular sequence; sometimes it is “compre-
hensible” in the sense which Jaspers understands in his
general treatise on psychopathology. But this comprehension
remains a grasp of general connections. For example we will
realize the link between chastity and mysticism, between
fainting and hypocrisy. But we are ignorant always of the
concrete relation between this chastity (this abstinence in
relation to a particular woman, this struggle against a definite
temptation) and the individual content of' the 'mysticism; in
the same way psychiatry is too quickly satisfied when it
throws light on the general structures of delusions and does
not seek to comprehend the individual, concrete content of
the psychoses (why this man believes himself to be that
particular historical personality rather than some other; why
his compensatory delusion is satisfied with specifically these
ideas of grandeur instead of others, etc.).
But most important of all, these “psychological” explana-
tions refer us ultimately to inexplicable original givens. These
are the simple bodies of psychology. We are told, for exam-
ple, that Flaubert had a “grandiose ambition” and all of the
previously quoted description depends on this original ambi-
tion. So far so good. But this ambition is an irreducible fact
which by no means satisfies the mind. The irreducibility here
has no justification other than refusal to push the analysis
further. There where the psychologist stops, the fact con-
fronted is given as primary. This is why we experience a
troubled feeling of mingled resignation and dissatisfactiori
when we read these psychological treatises. “See,” we sav
to ourselves, “Flaubert was ambitious. He was that kind of
man.” It would be as futile to ask why he was such as to seek
716 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
to know why he was talDand blond. Of course we have to
stop somewhere; it is the very contingency of all real exis-
tence. This rock is covered with moss, the rock next to it
is not. Gustave Flaubert had literary ambition, and his
brother Achille lacked it. That’s the way it is. In the same
way we want to know the properties of phosphorus, and we
attempt to reduce them to the structure of the chemical
molecules which compose it. But why are there molecules
of this type? That’s the way it is, that’s all. The explanation
of Flaubert’s psychology will consist, if it is possible, in
referring the complexity of his behavior patterns, his
feelings, and his tastes back to certain properties, compar-
able to those of chemical bodies, beyond which it would
be foolish to attempt to proceed. Yet we feel obscurely that
Flaubert had not “received” his ambition. It is meaningful;
therefore it is free. Neither heredity, nor bourgeois back-
ground nor education can account for it, stdl less those,
physiological considerations regarding the “nervous temper-
ament,” which have been the vogue for some time now.
The nerve is not meaningful; it is a colloidal substance which
can be described in itself and which does not have the qual-
ity of transcendence; that is, it does not transcend itself in'
order to make known to itself by means of other realities '
what it is. Under no circumstances could the nerve furnish
the basis for meaning. In one sense Flaubert’s ambition is a
fact with all a fact’s contingency — and it is true that it is
impossible to advance beyond that fact — but in another sense
it makes itself, and our satisfaction is a guarantee to us
that we may be able to grasp beyond this ambition some-
thing more, something like a radical decision which, without
ceasing to be contingent, would be the veritable psychic .
irreducible.
What we are demanding then — and what nobody ever
attempts to give us — is a veritable irreducible;' that is, an
irreducible of which the irreducibility would be self-evident,
which would not be presented as the postulate of the psychol-
ogist and the result of his refusal or his incapacity to go fur-
ther, but which when established would produce in us an ac-
companying feeling of satisfaction. This demand on our part
does not come from that ceaseless pursuit of a cause, that in-
finite regress which has often been described as constitutive
of rational research and which consequently — ^far from being
exclusively associated with psychological investigation — may
DOING AND HAVING 717
be found in all disciplines and in all problems. This is not
the childish quest of a “because,” which allows no fur-
ther “why?” It is on the .contrary a demand based on a
pre-ontological comprehension of human reality and on the
related refusal to consider man as capable of being analyzed
and reduced to . original givens, to determined desires
(or “drives”), supported by the subject as properties by an
object. Even if we were to consider him as such, it would
be necessary to chooser either Flaubert, the man, whom
we can love or detest, blame or praise, who represents for
us the Other, who directly attacks our being by the very,
fact that he has existed, would-.be originally a substratum
unqualified by these desires, that is, a sort of indeterminate
clay which would have to receive them passively; or he would
be reduced to the simple bundle of these irreducible drives
or tendencies. In either case the man disappears; we can no
longer find “the one” to whom this or that experience has
happened; either in looking for the person, we encounter
a useless, contradictory metaphysical substance — or else the
being whom we seek vanishes in a dust of phenomena bound
together by external connections. But what each one of us
requires in his very effort to comprehend another is that he
should never have to resort to this idea of substance which
is inhuman because it is well this side of the human. Finally
the fact is that the being considered does not crumble into
dust, and one can discover in him that unity — ^for which
substance was only a caricature — ^which must be a unity of
responsibility, a unity agreeable or hateful, blamable and
prmseworthy, in short personal. This unity, which is the
being of the man under consideration, is a free unification,
and this unification can not come after a diversity which
it unifies.
But to be, for Flaubert, as for every subject of “biography,”
means to be unified in the world. The ureducible unifi-
c^on which we ought to find, which is Flaubert, and
which we require biographers to reveal to us — ^this is the
unification of an original project, a unification which should
reveal itself to us as a non-substantial absolute. Therefore
we should forego these so-called irreducible details - and
taking the very evidence of them for a criterion, not ston
in our investigation before it is evident that we neither can
nor ought to go any further. In particular we must avoid
trying to reconstruct a person by means of his inclinations
718 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
. just as Spinoza warns us not to attempt to reconstruct a sub-
stance or its attributes by the summation of its modes. Every
desire if presented as an irreducible is an absurd contingency
and involves in absurdity human reality taken as a whole.
For example, if I declare of one of my friends that he “likes
to go rowing,” I deliberately intend to stop my investigation
there. But on the other hand, I thus establish a contingent
fact, which nothing can explain and which, though it has
the gratuity of free decision, by no means has its autonomy.
I can not in fact consider this fondness for rowing as the
fundamental project of Pierre; it contains something secon-
dary and derived. Those who portray a character in this
way by successive strokes come close to holding that each
of these strokes — each one of the desires confronted — is
bound to the others by connections which are purely con-
tingent and simply external. Those who, on the other hand,
try to explain this liking will fall into the view of what
Comte called materialism; that is, of explaining the higher
by the lower. Someone will say, for example, that the subject
considered is a sportsman who likes violent exercise and is in
addition a man of the outdoors who especially likes open
air sports. By more general and less differentiated tendencies
he will try to explain this desire, which stands in exactly the
same relation to them as the zoological species does to the
genus. Thus the psychological explanation, when it does not
suddenly decide to stop, is sometimes the mere putting into
relief relations of pure concomitance or of constant succes-
sion, and it is at other times a simple classification. To explain
Pierre’s fondness for rowing is to make it a member of the
family of fondness for open air sports and to attach this
family to that of fondness for sports in general. Moreover we
will be able to find still more general and barren rubrics if
we classify the taste for sports as one aspect of the love of
chance, which will itself be given as a specific instance of
the fundamental fondness for play. It is obvious that this
so-called explanatory classification has no more value or
interest than the classification in ancient botany; like the
latter it amounts to assuming the priority of the abstract
over the concrete- — as if the fondness for play existed first
in general to be subsequently made specific by the action
of these circumstances in the love of sport, the latter in the
fondness for rowing, and finally the rowing in the desire to
row on a particular stream, under certain circumstances in a
719
doing and having
particular season— and like the ancient classifications it fails
to explain the concrete' enrichment which at each stage is
undergone by the abstract inclination considered.
Furthermore how are we to believe that a desire to row is
only a desire to row? Can we truthfully admit that it c^ be
reduced so simply to what it is? The most discernmg ethicists
have shown how a desire reaches beyond itself. Pascal believed
that he could discover in hunting, for example, of tennis,
or in a hundred other occupations, the need of being diverted.
He revealed that in an activity which would be absurd if
reduced to itself, there was, a meaning which transcended it,
that is, an indication which referred to the reality of man
in general and to his condition. Similarly Stendhal in spite
of his attachment to ideologists, and Proust in spite of his
intellectualistic and analytical tendencies, have shown that
love and jealousy can not be reduced to the strict desire
of possessing a particular woman, but that these emotions
aim at laying hold of the world in its entirety through the
woman. This is the meaning of Stendhal’s crystallization,
and' it is precisely f of this reason that love as Stendhal de-
, scribes it' appears as a mode of being in the world. Love is
a fundamental relation of the for-itself to the world and to
itself (selfness) through a particular woman; the woman
represents only a conducting body which is placed in the
circuit'. These' analyses may be inexact or only partially true;
never&eless they make us suspect a method other than pure
analytical description. In the same way Catholic novelists
immediately see in carnal love its surpassing toward God — in
Don Juan, “the eternally unsatisfied,” in sin, “the place
empty of God.” There is no question here of finding again
^ abstract behind the concrete; the impulse toward God
is no less concrete than the impulse toward a particidar
woman. On the contrary, it is a matter of rediscovering
under the partial and incomplete aspects of the subject the
veritable concreteness which can be only the totality of his
impulse toward being, his original relation to himself, to the
world, and to the Other, in the unity of internal relations
and of a fundamental project. This impulse can be only
purely individual and unique. Far from estranging us from
the person, as Bourget’s analysis, for example, does in
constituting the individual by means of a summation of
general maxims, this impose will not lead us to find in the
need of writing — and of writing particular books — the need'
720 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
of activity in general. On the contrary, rejecting equally the
theory of malleable clay and that of the bundle of drives, we
will discover the individual person in the initial project
which constitutes him. It is for this reason that the irreduci-
bility of the result attained will be revealed as self-evident,
not because it is the poorest and the most abstract but be-
cause it is the richest. The intuition here will be accompanied
by an individual fullness.
The problem poses itself in approximately these terms:
If we admit that the person is a totality, we can not hope
to reconstruct him by an addition or by an organization of
the diverse tendencies which we have empirically discovered
in him. On the contrary, in each inclination, in each ten-
dency the person expresses himself completely, although from
a different angle, a little as Spinoza’s substance expresses
itself completely in each of its attributes. But if this is so, we
should discover in each tendency, in each attitude of the
subject, a meaning which transcends it. A jealousy of a partic-
ular date in which a subject historicizes himself in relation
to a certain woman, signifies for the one who knows how to
interpret it, the total relation to the world by which the sub-
ject constitutes himself as a self. In other words this empiri-
cal attitude is by itself the expression of the “choice of an
intelligible character.” There is no mystery about this. We no
longer have to do with an intelligible pattern which can
be present in our thought only, while we apprehend and
conceptualize the unique pattern of the subject’s empirical
existence. If the empirical attitude signifies the choice of
the intelligible character, it is because it is itself this choice.
Indeed the distinguishing characteristic of the intelligible
choice, as we shall see later, is that it can exist only as
the transcendent meaning of each concrete, empirical choice.
It is by no means first effected in some unconscious or on
the noumenal level to be subsequently expressed in a partic-
ular observable attitude; there is not even an ontological
pre-eminence over the empirical choice, but it is on principle
that which must always detach itself from the empirical
choice as its beyond and the infinity of its transcendence.
Thus if I am rowing on the river, I am nothing — either
here or in any other world — save this concrete project of
rowing. But this project itself, inasmuch as it is the totality
of my being, expresses my original choice in particular
circumstances; it is nothing other than the choice of myself
DOING AND HAVING
721
as a totality in these circumstances. That is why a special
method must aim at detaching the fundamental meaning
which the project admits and which can be only the individ-
ual secret of the subject’s being-in-the-world. It is then
rather by a comparison of the various empirical drives of a
subject &at we try to discover and disengage the fundamental
project which is common to them all — and not by a simple
summation or reconstruction of these tendencies; each drive
or tendency is the entire person.
There is naturally an infin ity of possible projects as there
is an infinity of possible human beings. Nevertheless, if
we are to recognize certain common characteristics among
them and if we are going to attempt to classify them in
larger categories, it is best first to undertake individual inves-
tigations in the cases which we can study more easily. In
our research, we will be guided by this principle: to stop
only in the presence of evident irreducibility; that is, never
to believe that we have reached the initial project until the
projected end appears as the very being of the subject under
consideration. This is why we can not stop at those classifi-
cations of “authentic project” and “unauthentic project of
the self” which Heidegger wishes to establish. In addition
to the fact that such a classification, in spite of its author’s
intent, is tainted with an ethical concern shown by its very
terminology, it is based on the attitude of the subject toward
his own death. Now if death causes anguish, and if con-
sequently we can either flee the anguish or throw ourselves
resolutely into it, it is a truism to say that this is because we
wish to hold on to life. Consequently anguish before death
and resolute decision or flight into unauthenticity can not
be considered as fundamental projects of our being. On the
contrary, they can be understood only on the foundation of
an original project of living; that is, on an original choice
of our being. It is right then in each case to pass beyond the
results of Heidegger’s interpretation toward a still more
fundamental project.
This fundamental project must not of course refer to
any other and should be conceived by itself. It can be con-
cerned neither with death nor life nor any particular charac-
teristic of the human condition; the original project of a
for-itself can aim only at its being. The project of being
or desire of being or drive toward being does not originate
in a physiological dMerentiation or in an empirical contin-
722 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
gency; in fact it is not distinguished from the being of the
for-itself. The for-itself is a being such that in its being, its
being is in question in the form of a project of being. To
the for-itself being means to make known to oneself
what one is by means of a possibility appearing as a value.
Possibility and value belong to the being of the for-itself.
The for-itself is defined ontologically as a lack of being, and
possibility belongs to the for-itself as that which it lacks, in
the same way that value haunts the for-itself as the totality
of being which is lacking. What we have expressed in Part
Two in terms of lack can be just as well expressed in terms
of freedom. The for-itself chooses because it is lack; freedom
is really synonymous with lack. Freedom is the concrete mode
of being of the lack of being. Ontologically then it amounts
to the same thing to say that value and possibility exist
as internal limits of a lack of being which can exist only
as a lack of being — or that the upsurge of freedom deter-
mines its possibility and thereby circumscribes its value.
Thus we can advance no further but have encountered the
self-evident irreducible when we have reached the project of
being; for obviously it is impossible to advance further than
being, and there is no difference between the proj-
ect of being, possibility, value, on the one hand, and being,
on the other. Fundamentally man is tbe desire to be, and
the existence of this desire is not to be established by an
empirical induction; it is the result of an a priori description
of the being of the for-itself, since desire is a lack and since
the for-itself is the being which is to itself its own lack of
being. The original project which is expressed in each of
our empirically observable tendencies is then the project of
being; or, if you prefer, each empirical tendency exists with
the original project of being, in a relation of expression
and symbolic satisfaction just as conscious drives, with
Freud, exist in relation to the complex and to the original
libido. Moreover the desire to be by no means exists first in
order to cause itself to be expressed subsequently by desires
a posteriori. There is nothing outside of the symbolic expres-
sion which it finds in concrete desires. There is not first a
single desire of being, then a thousand particular feelings,
Imt the desire to be exists and manifests itself only in and
through jealousy, greed, love of art, cowardice, courage, and
a thousand contingent, empirical expressions which always
723
DOING AND HAVING
cause human reality to appear to us only as manifested by
aparticM/ar man, by a specific person. _
As for the being which is the object of this desire, we
know a priori what this is. The for-itself is being
which is to itself its own lack of being. The being which
the for-itself lacks is the in-itself. The for-itself arises as
the nihilation of the in-itself and this nihilation is defeed as
the project toward the in-itself. Between the nihilated in-itself
and the projected in-itself the for-itself is nothingness. Thus
the end and the goal of the nihilation which I am is the in-
itself. Thus human reality, is the desire of being-in-itself.
But the in-itself which it desires can not be pure contingent,
absurd in-itself, comparable at every point to that which it
encounters and which it rdhilates. The nihilation, as we have
seen, is in fact like a revolt of the in-itself, which nihilates
itself against its contingency. To say that the for-itself lives
its facticity, as we have seen in the chapter concerning the
body, amounts to saying that the nihilation is the vain effort
of a being to found its own being and that it is the with-
drawal to found being which provokes the minute displace-
ment by which nothingness enters into being. The being which
forms the object of the desire of the for-itself is then an in- ,
itself which would be to itself its own foundation; that is,
which would be to its facticity in the same relation as the
for-itself is to its motivations. In addition the for-itself, being
the negation of the in-itself, could not desire the pure and
simple return to the in-itself. Here as with Hegel, the riegation
of the negation can not bring us back to our point of de-
parture. Quite the contrary, what the for-itself demands of
the in-itself is precisely the totality detotalized — “In-itself
nilulated in for-itself,” In other words the for-itself projects
being as for-itself, a being which is what it is. It is as
being which is what it is not, and which is not what it is, that
the for-itself projects being what it is. It is as consciousness
that ^ it wishes to have the impermeability and infinite
density of the in-itself. It is as the nihilation of the in-itself
? perpetual evasion of contingency and of facticity
that it wishes to-be its own foundation. This is why the
possible is projected in general as what the for-itself lacks
m order to become in-itself-for-itself. The fundamental
value which presides over this project is exactly the in-itself-
lor-itself; that is, the ideal of a consciousness which would
oe the foundation of its own being-in-itself by the pure
724 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
consciousness which it would have of itself. It is this ideal
which can be called God. Thus the best way to conceive of
the fundamental project of human reality is to say that
man is the being whose project is to be God. Whatever may
be the myths and rites of the religion considered, God is
first “sensible to the heart” of man as the one who identifies
and defines him in his ultimate and fundamental project.
If man possesses a pre-ontological comprehension of the
being of God, it is not the great wonders of nature nor
the power of society which have conferred it upon him. God,
value and supreme end of transcendence, represents the
permanent limit in terms of which man makes known to
himself what he is. To be man means to reach toward being
God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to
be God.
It may be asked, if man on coming into the world is borne
toward God as toward his limit, if he can choose only to
be God, what becomes of freedom? For freedom is nothing
other than a choice which creates for itself its own pos-
sibilities, but it appears here that the initial project of being
God, which “defines” man, comes close to being the same as
a human “nature” or an “essence.” The answer is that while
the meaning of the desire is ultimately the project of being
God, the desire is never constituted by this meaning; on the
contrary, it always represents a particular discovery of its ends.
These ends in fact are pursued in terms of a particular em-
pirical situation, and it is this very pursuit which consti-
tutes the surroundings as a situation. The desire of being
is always realized as the desire of a mode of "being. And
this desire of a mode , of being expresses itself in turn as
the meaning of the m5n:iads of concrete desires which consti-
tute the web of our conscious life. Thus we find ourselves
before very complex symbolic structures which have at
least three stories. In empirical-desire I can discern a sym-
bolization of a fundamental concrete desire which is the person
himself and which represents the mode in which he has de-
cided that being would be in question in his being. This
fundamental desire in turn expresses concretely in the world
within the particular situation enveloping the individual,
an abstract meaningful structure which is the desire of being
in general; it must be considered as human reality in the
person, and it brings about his community with others, thus
making it possible to state that there is a truth concerning
DOING AND HAVING 725
man and not only concerning individuals who can not be
compared. Absolute concreteness, completion, existence as
a totality belong then to the free and fundamental desire
which is the unique person. Empirical desire is only a sym-
bolization of this; it refers to this and derives its meaning
from it while remaining partial and reducible, for the
empirical desire can not be conceived in isolation. On the
other hand, the desire of being in its abstract purity is the
truth of the concrete fundamental desire, but it does not
exist by virtue of reality. Thus the fundamental project, the
person, the free realization of human truth is everywhere in
all desires (save for those exceptions treated in the preceding
chapter, concerning, for example, “indifferents”)- It is never
apprehended except through desires — as we can apprehend
space only through bodies which shape it for us, though
space is a specific reality and not a concept. Or, if you like, it
is like the object, of Husserl, which reveals itself only by
Abschattungen, and which nevertheless does not allow itself
to be absorbed by any one Abschattung. We can understand
after these remarks that the abstract, ontological “desire to .
be” is unable to represent the fundamental, human structure
of the individual; it can not be an obstacle to his freedom.
Freedom in fact, as we. have shown in the preceding chapter,
is strictly identified with nihilation. The only being which
can be called free is the being which nihilates its being.
Moreover we know that nihilation is lack of being and
can not be otherwise. Freedom is precisely the being which
makes itself a lack of being. But since desire, as we have
established, is identical with lack of being, freedom can
arise only as being which makes itself a desire of being; that
IS, as the project-for-itself of being in-itself-for-itself. Here
we have arrived at an abstract structure which can by no means
be considered as the nature or essence of freedom. Freedom
IS existence, and in it existence precedes essence. The up-
surge of freedom is immediate and concrete and is not
to be distinguished from its choice; that is, from the person
h^elf. But the structure rmder consideration can be called
truth of freedom; that is, it is the human meaning
of freedom. ®
It should be possible to establish the human truth of the
person, as we have attempted to do by an ontological phenom-
enology. The catalogue of empirical desires ought to be
made the object of appropriate psychological investigations.
726 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
observation and induction and, as needed, experience can
serve to draw up this list. They will indicate to the philosopher
the comprehensible relations which can unite to each other
various desires and various patterns of behaviors, and will
bring to light certain concrete connections between the
subject of experience and “situations” experientially defined
(which at bottom originate ..only from limitations applied
in the name of positivity to the fundamental situation of
the subject in the world). But in establishing and classifying
fundamental desires of individual persons neither of these
methods is appropriate. Actually there can be no question of
determining a priori and ontologically what appears in all the
unpredictability of a free act. This is why we shall limit
ourselves here to indicating very summarily the possibilities
of such a quest and its perspectives. The very fact that we
can subject any man whatsoever to such an investigation —
that is what belongs to human reality in general. Or, if you
prefer, this is what can be established by an ontology. But
the inquiry itself and its results are on principle wholly out-
side the possibilities of an ontology.
On the other hand, pure, simple empirical despription can
only give us catalogues and put us in the presence of pseudq-
irreducibles (the desire to write, to svrim, a taste for adven-
ture, jealousy, etc.). It is not enough in fact to draw up a
list of behavior patterns, of drives and inclinations, it
is necessary also to decipher them; that is, it is necessary to
know how to question them. This research can be conduct-
ed only according to the rules of a specific method. It is this
method which we call existential psychoanalysis.
The principle of this psychoanalysis is that man is a
totality and not a collection. Consequently he expresses hknzr
self as a whole in even his most insignificant and his most
superficial behavior. In other words there is not a taste, a
mannerism, or a human act which is not revealing.
The goal of psychoanalysis is to decipher the empirical
behavior patterns of man; that is to bring out in the open
the revelations which each one of them contains and to fix
them conceptually
Its point of departure -is experience; its pillar of support
is the fundamental, pre-ontological comprehension which
man has of the human person. Although the majority
of people can well ignore the indications contained
in a gesture, a word, a sign and can look with scorn on
DOING AND HAVING
W
the revelation which they carry, each human individual never-
theless possesses a priori the meaning of the revelatory value
of these manifestations and is capable of deciphering them,
at least if he is aided and guided by a helping hand. Here
as elsewhere, truth is not encountered by chance; it does not
belong to a domain where one must seek it without ever
having any presentiment of its location, as one can go to
look for the source of the Nile or of the Niger. It belongs
a priori to human comprehension and the essential task is
an hermeneutic; that is, a deciphering, a determination, and
a conceptualization.
Its method is comparative. Since each example of human
conduct symbolizes in its own manner the fundamental
choice which must be brought to light, and since at the
same time each one disguises this choice under its occa-
sional character and its historical opportunity, only the
comparison of these acts of conduct can effect the emergence
of the unique revelation which they all express in a differ-
ent way. The first outline of this method has been furnished
for us by the psychoanalysis of Freud and his disciples. For
this reason it will be profitable here to indicate more specif-
ically the points where existential psychoanalysis will be
inspired by psychoanalysis proper and those where it will
radically differ from it.
Both kinds of psychoanalysis consider all objectively dis-
cernible manifestations of “psychic life” as symbols main-
taining symbolic relations to the fundamental, total structures
which constitute the individual person. Both consider that
there are no primary givens such as hereditary dispositions,
character, etc. Existential psychoanalysis recognizes nothing
before the original upsurge of human freedom; empirical
psychoanalysis holds that the original affectivity of the individ-
ual is virgin wax before its history. The libido is nothing
besides its concrete fixations, save for a permanent possibility
of fixing anything whatsoever upon anything whatsoever.
Both consider the human being as a perpetual, searching
historization. Rather than uncovering static, constant givens
they discover the meaning, orientation, and adventures of
this history. Due to this fact both consider man in the world
and do not imagine that one can question the being of a
man without taking into account all his situation. Psycho-
logical investigations aim at reconstituting the life of the sub-
ject from birth to the moment of the cure; they utilize all
728 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
th.6 objective documentation which they can find, letters,
witnesses, intimate diaries, “social” information of every
kind. What they aim at restoring is less a pure psychic event
than a twofold structure: the crucial event of infancy and the
psychic crystallization around this event. Here again we have
to do with a situation. Each “historical” fact from this
point of view will be considered at once as a factor of the
psychic evolution and as a symbol of that evolution. For it
is nothing in itself. It operates only according to the way in
which it is taken and this very manner of taking it expresses
symbolically the internal disposition of the individual.
Empirical psychoanalysis and existential psychoanalysis
both search within an existing situation for a fundamental
attitude which can not be expressed by simple, logical
definitions because it is prior to all logic, and which requires
reconstruction according to the laws of specific syntheses.
Empirical psychoanalysis seeks to determine the complex,
the very name of which indicates the polyvalence of all the
meanings which are referred back to it. Existential psycho-
analysis seeks to determine the original choice. This
original choice operating in the face of the world and being
a choice of position in the world is total like the complex,
it is prior to logic like the complex. It is this which decides
the attitude of the person^ when confronted with logic and
principles, therefore there can be no possibility of question-
ing it in conformance to logic. It brings together in a pre-
iogical synthesis the totality of the existent, and as such it
is the center of reference for an infinity of polyvalent
meanings.
Both our psychoanalyses' refuse to admit that the subject
is in a privileged position to proceed in these inquiries con-
cerning himself. They equally insist on a strictly objective
method, using as documentary evidence the data of reflection
as well as the testimony of others. Of course the subject
can undertake a psychoanalytic investigation of himself.
But in this case he must renounce at the outset all benefit
stemming from his peculiar position and must question
himself exactly as if he were someone else. Empirical psycho-
analysis in fact is based on the hypothesis of the existence of ^
an unconscious psyche, which on principle escapes the intui-
tion of the subject. Existential psychoanalysis rejects the hy-
pothesis of the unconscious; it makes the psychic act co-exten-
sive with consciousness. But if the fundamental project is fully
DOING AND HAVING
729
experienced by the subject and hence wholly conscious, that
certainly does not mean that it must by the same token be
known by him; quite the contrary. The reader will perhaps re-
call the care we took in the Introduction to distinguish between
consciousness and knowledge. To be sure, as we have seen
earlier, reflection can be considered as a quasi-knowledge.
But what it grasps at each moment is not &e pure project
of the for-itself as it is s3anbolically expressed — often in
several ways at once — by the concrete behavior which it
apprehends. It grasps the concrete behavior itself; that is,
the specific dated desire in all its characteristic network. It
grasps at once symbol and symbolization. This apprehension,
to be sure, is entirely constituted by a pre-ontological com-
prehension of the fundamental project; better yet, in so far
as reflection is almost a non-thetic consciousness of itself as
reflection, it is this same project, as well as the non-refiec-
tive consciousness. But it does not follow that it commands
the instruments and techniques necessary to isolate the
choice symbolized, to fix it by concepts, and to bring it forth
into the full light of day. It is penetrated by a great light
without being able to express what this light is illuminating.
We are not dealing with an unsolved riddle as the Freudians
believe; all is there, luminous; reflection is in full possession
of it, apprehends all. But this “mystery in broad daylight”
is due to the fact that this possession is deprived of the
means which would ordinarily permit analysis and con-
ceptualization. It grasps everjrthing, all at once, without
shading, without relief, without connections of grandeur —
not that these shades, these values, these reliefs exist some-
where and are hidden from it, but rather because they must
be established by another human attitude and because
they can exist only by means of and for knowledge. Reflec-
tion, unable to serve as the basis for existential psycho-
analysis, will then simply furnish us with the brute materials
toward which the psychoanalyst must take an objective
attitude. Thus only will he be able to know what he already
understands. The result is that complexes uprooted from
the depths of the unconscious, like projects revealed by exis-
tential psychoanalysis, will be apprehended from the point of
view of the Other. Consequently the object thus brought into
the light will be articulated according to the structures of
the transcended-transcendence; that is, its being will be the
being-for-others even if the psychoanalyst and the subject
730 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
of the psychoanalysis are actually the same person. Thus the
project which is brought to light by either kind of psycho-
analysis can be only the totality of the individual human
being, the irreducible element of the transcendence with the
structure of being-for-others. What always escapes these
methods of investigation is the project as it is for itself, the
complex in its own being. This project-for-itself can be
experienced only as a living possession; there is an incom-
patibility between existence for-itself and objective exis-
tence. But the object of the two psychoanalyses has in it
nonetheless the reality of a being; the subject’s knowledge
of it can in addition contribute to clarify reflection, and
that reflection can then become a possession which will be a
quasi-knowing.
At this point the similarity between the two kinds of
psychoanalysis ceases. They differ fundamentally in that em-
pirical psychoanalysis has decided upon its own irreducible
instead of allowing this to make itself known in a self-
evident intuition. The libido or the will to power in actual-
ity constitutes a psycho-biological residue which is not
clear in itself and which does not appear to us as being be-
forehand the irreducible limit of the investigation. Finally
it is experience which establishes that the foundation of com-
plexes is this libido or this will to power; and these results
of empirical inquiry are perfectly contingent, they are not
convincing. Nothing prevents our conceiving a priori of a
“human reality” which would not be expressed by the will
to power, for the libido would not constitute the original,
undifferentiated project.
On the other hand, the choice to which existential psy-
choanalysis will lead us, precisely because it is a choice',
accounts for its original contingency, for the contingency
of the choice is the reverse side of its freedom. Furthermore,
inasmuch as it is established on the lack of being, conceived
as a fundamental characteristic of being, it receives its
legitimacy as a choice, and we know that we do not have
to push further. Each result then will be at once fully con-
tingent and legitimately irreducible. Moreover it will always
remain particular; that is, we will not achieve as the ulti-
mate goal of our investigation and the foundation of all
behavior an abstract, general term, libido for example,
which would be differentiated and made concrete first in
DOING AND HAVING
731
complexes and then in detailed acts of conduct, due to the
action of external facts and the history of the subject. On
the contrary, it will be a choice which remains unique
and which is from the start absolute concreteness. Details of
behavior can express or particularize this choice, but they
can not make it more concrete than it already is. That is be-
cause the choice is nothing other than the being of each human
reality; this amounts to saying that a particular partial be-
havior is or expresses the original choice of this human reality
since for human reality there is no difference between existing
and choosing for itself. From this fact we understand that ex-
istential psychoanalysis does not have to proceed from the
fundamental “complex,” which is exactly the choice of being,
to an abstraction like the libido which would explain it. The
complex is the ultimate choice, it is the choice of being and
makes itself such. Bringing it into the light will reveal it-
each time as evidently irreducible. It follows necessarily
that the libido and the will to power will appear to existen-
tial psychoanalysis neither as general characteristics common
to all mankind nor as irreducibles. At most it will be pos-
sible after the investigation to establish that they express by
virtue of particular ensembles in certain subjects a funda-
mental choice which can not be reduced to either one of
them. We have seen in fact that desire and sexuality in gen-
eral express an original effort of the for-itself to recover
its being which has become estranged through contact with
the Other. The will to power also originally supposes being-
for-others, the comprehension of the Other, and the choice
of winning its own salvation by means of the Other. The
foundation of this attitude must be an original choice
which would make us understand the radical identification
of being-in-itself-for-itself with being-for-others.
'Hie fact that the ultimate term of this existential in-
quiry must be a choice distinguishes even better the psycho-
analysis for which we have outlined the method and princi-
pal features. It thereby abandons the supposition that the
environment acts mechanically on the subject under consid-
eration. The environment can act on the subject only to the
exact extent that he comprehends it; that is, transforms it
into a situation. Hence no objective description of this en-
vironment could" be of any use to us. From the start the
environment conceived as a situation refers to the for-itself
732 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
which is choosing, just as the for-itself refers to the envi-
ronment by the very fact that the for-itself is in the world.
By renouncing all mechanical causation, we renounce at the
same time all general interpretation of the symbolization
confronted. Our goal could not be to establish empirical laws
of succession, nor could we constitute a universal symbol-
ism. Rather the psychoanalyst will have to rediscover at
each step a symbol functioning in the particular case which
he is considering. If each being is a totality, it is not con-
ceivable that there can exist elementary symbolic relation-
ships (e.g., the faeces = gold, or a pincushion = the breast)
which preserve a constant meaning in all cases; that is, which
remain unaltered when they pass from one meaningful en-
semble to another ensemble. Futhermore the psychoanalyst
will never lose sight of the fact that the choice is living
and consequently can be revoked by the subject who is
being studied. We have shown in the precedmg chapter the
importance of the instant, which represents abrupt changes
in orientation and the assuming of a new position in the
face of an unalterable past. From this moment on, we must
always be ready to consider that symbols change meaning
and to abandon the symbol used hitherto. Thus existential
psychoanalysis will have to be completely flexible and .adapt
itself to the slightest observable changes in the subject. Our
concern here is to understand what is individual and often
even instantaneous. The method which has served for one
subject will not necessarily be suitable to use for another
subject or for the same subject at a later period.
Precisely because the goal of the inquiry must be to dis-
cover a choice and not a state, the investigator must recall
on every occasion that his object is not a datum buried in
the darkness of the unconscious but a free, conscious deter-
mination — ^which is not even resident in consciousness, but
which is one with this consciousness itself. Empirical psycho-
analysis, to the extent that its method is better than its prin-
ciples, is often in sight of an existential discovery, but it
always stops part way. When it thus approaches the funda-
mental choice, the resistance of the subject collapses suddenly
and he recognizes the image of himself which is presented
to him as if he were seeing himself in a mirror. This in-
voluntary testimony of the subject is precious for the psycho-
^alyst; he sees there the sign that he has reached his goal;
he can pass on from the investigation proper to the cure.
733
DOING AND HAVING
But nothing in his principles or in his initial postulates
permits him to understand or to utilize this testimony. Where
could he get any such right? If the complex is really uncon-
scious— that is, if there is a barrier separating the sign from
the thing signified— how could the subject recognize it?
Does the unconscious complex recognize itself? But haven’t
we been told that it lacks understanding? And if of ne-
cessity we granted to it the faculty of understanding the
signs, would this not be to make of it by the same token a
conscious unconscious? What is understanding if not to be
conscious of what is understood? Shall we say on the other
hand that it is the subject as conscious who recognizes the
image presented? But how could he compare it with his
true state since that is out of reach and since he has never
had any knowledge of it? At most he will be able to
judge that the psychoanalytic explanation of his case is
a probable hypothesis, which derives its probability from
the number of behavior patterns which it explains. His
relation to this interpretation is that of a third party, that
of the psychoanalyst himself; he has no privileged position.
And if he believes in the probability of the psychoanalytic
hypothesis, is this simple belief, which lives in the limits
of his consciousness, able' to effect the breakdown of the
barriers which dam up the unconscious tendencies? The'
psychoanalyst doubtless had some obscure picture of an
abrupt coincidence of conscious and unconscious. But he
has removed all methods of conceiving of this coincidence
in any positive sense.
Still, the enlightenment of the subject is a fact. There
IS an intuition here which is accompanied by evidence. The
subject guided .by the psychoanalyst does more and better
than to give his agreement to an hypothesis; he touches it,
he sees what it is. This is truly understandable only if the
subject has never ceased being conscious of his deep ten-
dencies; better yet, only if these drives are not distinguished
from his conscious self. In this case as we have seen, the
traditional psychoanalytic interpretation does not cause him
to attain consciousness of what he is; it causes him to attain
knowledge of what he is. It is existential psychoanalysis
then which claims the final intuition of the subject as deci-
sive.
This comparison allows us to understand better what an
existential psychoanalysis must be if it is entitled to exist.
734 ' ’ BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
It is a method destined to bring to light, in a strictly ob-
jective form, the subjective choice by which each living
person makes himself a person; that is, makes known to him-
self what he is. Since what the method seeks is a choice of be-
ing at the same time as a being, it must reduce particular
behavior patterns to fundamental relations — not of sexual-
ity or of the will to power, but of being — ^which are expressed
in this behavior. It is then guided from the start toward
a comprehension of being and must not assign itself any
other goal than to discover being and the mode of being
of the being confronting this being. It is forbidden to
stop before attaining this goal. It will utilize the compre-
hension of being which characterizes the investigator inas-
much as he is himself a human reality; and as it seeks to
detach being from its symbolic expressions, it will have to
rediscover each time on the basis of a comparative study
of acts and attitudes, a symbol destined to decipher them.
Its criterion of success will be the number of facts which
its hypothesis permits it to explain and to unify as well as
the self-evident intuition of the irreducibility of the end
attained. To this criterion will be added in all cases where
it is possible, the decisive testimony of the subject. The re-
sults thus achieved — that is, the ultimate ends of the individ-
ual — can then become the object of a classification, and it
is by the comparison of these results that we will be able
to establish general considerations about_ human reality as
an empirical choice of its own ends. The behavior studied
by this psychoanalysis will include not only dreams, failures,
obsessions, and neuroses, but also and especially the thoughts
of waking life, successfully adjusted acts, style, etc. This
psychoanalysis has not yet found its Freud. At most we can
find the foreshadowing of it in certain particularly successful
biographies. We hope to be able to attempt elsewhere two
examples in relation to Flaubert and Dostoevsky. But it mat-,
ters little to us whether it now exists; the important thing
is that it is possible.
n. “DOING” AND “HAVING”: POSSESSION
The information which ontology can furnish concern-
ing behavior patterns and desire must serve as the basic prin-
ciples of existential psychoanalysis. This does not mean that
doing>and having- ^
to. is an over-all pattern o£ "‘h'el^TwuS
men;, it. means ^that J“““beoaSe Sch desire-the
emerge during the study SY jesire of creating
desire of f °/^s^®fS®human reality. As I have s^own
Sere,= the knowledge of ^,^j“^nirsi£fflcanoe!
te^rroS^iogy
S Taboi desire, since desire is the bemg of human-
'*’Sle is a lack of being. As such h is directly
by the being of which it is a lack. This being, as we
said, is the in-itself-for-itself, consciousness become s^stance
substance become the cause of itself, the Man-God. s
being of human reality is originally not a substance but a
lived relation. The limiting terms of this relation are first the
original In-itself, fixed in its contingency and its facticity, its
essential characteristic being that it is, that it exists; and sec-
ond the In-itself-for-itself or value, which exists as the ideal
of the contingent In-itself and which is characterized as be-
yond all contingency and all existence. Man is neither the one
nor the other of these beings, for strictly speaking, we
should never say of him that he is at all. He is what he is riot
and he is not what he is; he is the nihilation of the contin-
gent In-itself in so far as the self of this nihilation is its flight
ahead toward the In-itself as self-cause. Human reality is the
pure effort to become God without there being any given sub-
stratum for that effort, without there being anything which
so endeavors. Desire expresses this endeavor.
Nevertheless desire is not defined solely in relation to the
In-itself-as-self-cause. It is also relative to a brute, concrete
existent which we commonly call the object of the desire.
This object may be now a slice of bread, now an automobile,
now a woman, now an object not yet realized and yet defined
— as when the artist desires to create a work of art. Thus by
its very structure desire expresses a man’s relation to one' or
several objects in the world; it is one of the aspects of Being-
^Esquisse d'une thdorie des Smotlons. 1939 .
736 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ia-the-world. From this point of view we see first that this
relation is not of a unique type. It is only by a sort of abbre-
viation that we speak of “the desire of something.” Actually
a thousand empirical examples show that we desire to possess
this object or to do that thing or to be someone. If I desire
this picture, it means that I desire to buy it, to appropriate it
for myself. If I desire to write a book, to go for a walk, it
means that I desire to “do” this book, to “do” this walk.
If I dress up, it is because I desire to be well-groomed. I train
myself in order to be a scientist, etc. Thus from the outset,
the three big categories of concrete human existence appear to-
ns in their original relation: to do, to have, to be.^
It is easy to see, however, that the desire to do is not irre-
ducible. One does (=makes) an object in order to enter into
a certain relation with it. This new relation can be immediate-
ly reducible to having. For example, I cut a cane from a
branch of a tree (I rfo a cane out of a branch) in order to
have this cane. The “doing” is reduced to a mode of having.
This is the most common example. But it can also happen
that my activity does not appear on the surface as reducible.
It can appear gratuitous as in the case of scientific research, or
sport, or aesthetic creation. Yet in these various examples do-
ing is still not irreducible. If I create a picture, a drama, a
melody, it is in order that I may be at the origin of a con-
crete existence. This existence interests me only to the degree
that the bond of creation which I establish between it and
me gives to me a particular right of ownership over it. It is
not enough that a certain picture which I have in mind
should exist; it is necessary as well that it exist through me.^
Evidently in one sense the ideal would be that I should
sustain the picture in being by a sort, of continuous creation
and that consequently it should be mine as though by a per-
petually renewed emanation. But in another sense it must be
radically distinct from myself — in order that it may be mine
but not me. Here as in the Cartesian theory of substances,
there is danger that the being of the created object may be
reabsorbed in my being because of lack of independence and
objectivity; hence it must of necessity exist also in itself, must
perpetually renew its existence by itself. Consequently my
work appears to me as a continuous creation but fixed in the
in-itself; it carries indefinitely my “mark”; that is, it is for
■‘Tr. The reader will recall that as stated earher the French word
means both “do” and “make.”
doing and having 737
an indefinite period “my” thought. Every work of art is a
thought, an “idea”; its characteristics are plainly ideal to the
extent that it is nothing _but a. meaning. But on the other
hand, this meaning, this thought which is in one sense per-
petually active as if I were perpetually forming it, as if a mind
were conceiving it without respite — a mind which would' be
my mind— this thought sustains itself alone in being;^ it by no
means ceases to be active when I am not actually thinking it.
I stand fo it then in the double relation of the consciousness
which conceives it and the consciousness which encounters
it. It is precisely this double relation which I express by say-
ing that it is mine. We shall see the meaning of it when we
have defined precisely the significance of the category “to
have.” It is in order to enter into this double relation in the
synthesis of appropriation that I create my work. In fact it is
tliis synthesis of self and not-self (the intimacy and trans-
lucency> of thought on the one hand and the opacity and
indifference of the in-itself on the other) that I ana aiming at
and which will establish my ownership of the work. In this
sense it is not only strictly artistic works which I appropriate
in this manner. This cane which I have cut from the branch
is also destined to belong to me in this double relation: first
as an object for everyday use, which is at my disposition and
which I possess as I possess my clothes or my books, and sec-
ond as my own work. Thus people who like to surround them-
selves with everyday objects which they themselves have
made, are enjoying subtleties of appropriation. They unite in a
single object and in- one syncretism the appropriation by
enjoyment and the appropriation by creation. We find this
same^ uniting into a single project everywhere from artistic
creation to the cigarette which “is better when I roll it my-
self.” Later we shall meet this project in connection with a
special type of ownership which stands as the degradation of
It— luxury— for we shall see that luxury is distinguished not
as a quality of the object possessed but as a quality of
possession. ^ ^
Knowing also — as we showed in the introduction to Part
Four— is a form of appropriation. That is, why scientific re-
search IS nothing other than an effort to appropriate. The
truth discovered, like the work of art, is my knowledge- it is
me noema of a thought which is discovered only when I
lorm the thought and which consequently appears in a certain
way as maintained in existence by ite. It is tooug“me TaH
738 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
facet of the world is revealed; it is to me that it reveals itself.
In this sense I am creator and possessor, not that I consider
the aspect of being which I discover as a pure representa-
tion, but on the contrary, because this aspect, although it is
revealed only by me, exists profoundly and really. I can say
only that I manifest it in the sense that Gide tells us that “we
always ought to manifest.” But I find again an independence
analogous to that of the work of art in the character of the
truth of my thought; that is, in its objectivity. This thought
which I form and which derives its existence from me pursues
at the same time its own independent existence to the extent
that it is thought by everybody. It is doubly “I”: it is the
world revealing itself to me and it is “I” in relation to others,
I forming my thought with the mind of others. At the same
time it is doubly closed against me: it is the being which I
am not (inasmuch as it reveals itself to me), and since it is
thought by all from the moment of its appearance, it is a
thought devoted to anonymity. This synthesis of self and not-
self can be expressed here by the term “mine.”
In addition the idea of discovery, of revelation, includes an
idea of appropriative enjoyment. What is seen is possessed; to
see is to deflower. If we examine the comparisons ordinarily
used to express the relation between the knower and the
known, we see that many of them are represented as being
a kind of violation by sight. The unknown object is given as
immaculate, as virgin, comparable to a whiteness. It has not
yet “delivered up” its secret; man has not yet “snatched” its
secret away from it. All these images insist that the object is
ignorant of the investigations and the instruments aimed at it;
it is unconscious of being known; it goes about its business
without noticing the glance which spies on it, like a woman
whom a passerby catches unaware at her bath. Figures of
speech, sometimes vague and sometimes more precise, like that
of the “unviolated depths” of nature suggest the idea of sexual
intercourse more plainly. We speak of snatching away her
veils from nature, of unveiling her (c/. Schiller’s Veiled Image
of Sdis). Every investigation implies the idea of a nudity
which one brings out into the open by clearing away the ob-
stacles which cover it, just as Actaeon clears away the
branches so that he can have a better view of Diana at her
bath. More than this, knowledge is a hunt. Bacon called it
the hunt of Pan. The scientist is the hunter who surprises a
white nudity and who violates by looking at it. Thus the to-
739
DOING AND HAVUsTG
tality of these images reveals something which we shall call
ihQ Actaeon complex. '
-By taking this idea of the hunt as a guidmg thread, we shall
discover another symbol of appropriation, perhaps still more
primitive; a person hunts for the sake of eating. Curiosity m
an animal is always either sexual or alimentary. To know is to
devour with the eyes.® In fact we can note here, so far as
knowledge through the senses is concerned, a process the
reverse of that which was discovered in connection with the
work of art. We remarked that the work of art is like a fixed
emanation of the min d. The mind is continually creating it
and" yet' it stands alone and indifferent in relation to that
creation. This same relation exists in the act of knowing, but
its opposite is not excluded. In knowing, consciousness at-
tracts the object to itself and incorporates it in itself. Knowl-
edge is assimilation. The writings of French epistemology
swarm with alimentary metaphors (absorption, digestion, as-
similation). -There is a movement of dissolution which passes
from the object to the knowing subject. The known^ is trans-
formed into me; it becomes my thought and thereby consents
to receive its existence from me alone. But this movement of
dissolution is fixed by the fact that the known remains in the
same place, indefinitely absorbed, devoured, and yet indefi-
nitely intact, wholly digested and yet wholly outside, as
indigestible as a stone. For naive imaginations the symbol of
the “digested indigestible” is very important; for example,
the stone in the stomach of the ostrich or Jonah in the
stomach of the whale. The symbol represents the dream of a
non-destructive assimilation. It is an unhappy fact — as Hegel
noted— -that desire destroys its object. In this sense, he said,
desire is the desire of devouring. In reaction against this
dialectical necessity, the For-itself dreams of an object which
may be entirely assimilated by me, which would be me, with-
out dissolving into me but still keeping the • structure of the
in-itself; for what I desire exactly is this object; and if I eat
It, I do not have it any more, I find nothing remaining except
myself. ^
^’piis impossible synthesis of assimilation and an assimilated
which maintains its integrity has deep-rooted connections
with basic sexual drives. The idea of “carnal possession” offers
“ttag' He wm'ts to taste what
oai, with TJI bS;
740 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
us the irritating but seductive figure of a body perpetually
possessed and perpetually new, on which possession leaves no
trace. This is deeply symbolized in the quality of “smooth” or
“polished.” What is smooth can be taken and felt but remains
no less impenetrable, does not give way in the least beneath
the appropriative caress — it is like water. This is the reason
why erotic descriptions insist on the smooth whiteness of a
woman’s body. Smooth — it is what re-fofms itself under the
caress, as water re-forms itself in its passage over the stone
which has pierced it. At the same time, as we have seen
earlier, the lover’s dream is to identify the beloved object
with himself and still preserve for it its own individuality;
let the Other become me without ceasing to be the Other. It
is at this point that we encounter the similarity to scientific
research: the known object, like the stone in the stomach of
the ostrich, is entirely within me, assimilated, transformed into
myself, and it is entirely me; but at the same time it is im-
penetrable, untransformable, entirely smooth, with the indif-
ferent nudity of a body which is beloved and caressed in vain.
It remains outside; to know it is to devour it yet without con-
suming it. We see here how the sexual and alimentary cur-
rents mingle and interpenetrate in order to constitute the
Actaeon complex and the Jonah complex; we can see the
digestive and sensual roots which are reunited to give birth to
the desire of knowing. Knowledge is at one and the same time
a penetration and a superficial caress, a digestion and the
contemplation from afar of an object which will never lose
its form, the production of a thought by a continuous crea-
tion and the establishment of the total objective indepen-
dence of that thought. The known object is my thought as a
thing. This is precisely what I profoundly desire when I un-
dertake my research — to apprehend my thought as a thing
and the thing as my thought The syncretic relation which pro-
vides the basis for the ensemble of such diverse tendencies
can be only a relation of appropriation. That is why the desire
to know, no matter how disinterested it may appear, is a rela-
tion of appropriation. To know is one of the forms which can
be assumed by to have.
There remains one type of activity which we willingly ad-
mit is entirely gratuitous : the activity of play and the “drives”
which* relate back to it. Can we discover an appropriate drive
in sport? To be sure, it must be noted first that play as con-
trasted with the spirit of seriousness appears to be the least
741
doing and having
, rwf reality. The serious
possessive attitude; world and attributing more
W involves starting from the wjr
reality to the world to the degree
serious man confers t®mty chance that
to which he belongs to the • chance that it is found at
materialism is serious; f.voritf SSe of the revolu-
all times and places as the serious They come
•tionary. TOs is because —00^ are
to know themselves first m ^ ^orld. In this
oppresses them, and they ancient adver-
one respect they are ^smem themselves and
saries, the possessors, who also come to Know^^ ^
appreciate themselves in terms world* it coaeu-
Thus all serious thought is thickened y > world,
lates; it is a disntissal of hum- f-or oMhe wor d^
The serious man is of the world nossibUitv
himself. He does not even imagine any looser P ^ ^
of getting out of the world, for he has given to hiinselt me
type of existence of the rock, j odious ^hat,
opacity of being-in-the-midst-of-the-world.
the serious man at bottom is hiding from ® ^ ^
sciousness,of his freedom; he is m bad faith and h^ bad
faith aims at presenting himself to his own ^ ^ .
sequence; everything is a consequence for him,
never any beginning. That is why he is so concerne
the consequences of his acts. Marx proposed the origmal dog-
ma of the serious when he asserted the priority of o jec ov
subject. Man is serious when he takes himself for ^ ° *
. Play, like Kierkegaard’s irony, releases subjectivity. What
is play indeed if not an activity of which man is the first ori-
gin, for which man himself sets the rules, and which h^ no
consequences except according to the rules posited? As
soon as a man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use
his freedom, a freedom, by the way, which could, just as well
be his anguish, then his activity is play. The first principle of
play is man himself; through it he escapes his natural nature;
he himself sets the value and rules for his acts and consents to
play only according to the rules which he himself has es-
tablished and defined. As a result, there is in a sense “little
reality” in the world. It' might appear then that when a man
is playing, bent on discovering himself as free in his very
action, he' certainly could not be concerned with possessing
a being in the world. His goal, which he aims at through
742 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
sports or pantomime or games, is to attain himself as a certain
being, precisely the being which is in question in his being.
The point of these remarks, however, is not to show us
that in play the desire to do is irreducible. On the contrary
we must conclude that the desire to do is here reduced to a
certain desire to be. The act is not its own goal for itself;
neither does its explicit end represent its goal and its pro-
found meaning; but the function of the act is to make mani-
fest and to present to itself the absolute freedom which is the
very being of the person. This particular type of project,
which has freedom for its foundation and its goal, deserves a
special study. It is radically different from all others in that
it aims at a radically different type of being. It would be
necessary to explain in full detail its relations with the project
of being-God, which has appeared to us as the deep-seated
structure of human reality. But such a study can not be made
here; it belongs rather to an Ethics and it supposes that there
has been a preliminary deJBnition of nature and the role of
purifying reflection (our descriptions have hitherto aimed
only at accessory reflection) ; it supposes in addition taking a
position which can be moral only in the face of values which
haunt the For-itself. Nevertheless the fact remains that the de-
sire to play is fundamentally the desire to be.
Thus the three categories “to be,” “to do,” and “to have”
are reduced here as everywhere to two; “to do” is purely tran-
sitional. Ultimately a desire can be only the desire to be or
the desire to have. On the other hand, it is seldom that play
is pure of all appropriative tendency, I am passing over the
desire of achieving a good performance or of beating a rec-
ord which can act as a stimulant for the sportsman; I am not
even speaking of the desire “to have” a handsome body and
harmonious muscles, which springs from the desire of appro-
priating objectively to myself my own being-for-others. These
desires do not always enter in and besides they are not funda-
mental. But there is always in sport 'an appropriative com-
ponent. In reality sport is a free transformation of the worldly
environment into the supporting element of the action. This
fact makes it creative like art. The environment may be a .field
of snow, an Alpine slope. To see it is already to possess it.
In itself it is already apprehended by sight as a symbol of
being.® It represents pure exteriority, radical spatiality; its un-
differentiation, its monotony, and its whiteness manifest the
® See Section III.
743
DOING AND HAVING
absolute nudity of substance; it is the in-itself which is only
in-itself, the being of the phenomenon, which being is mam-
fested suddenly outside all phenomena. At the same time its
solid immobility expresses the permanence and the objective
resistance of the In-itself, its opacity and its impenetrability.
Yet this first intuitive enjoyment can not suffice me. That
pure in-itself, comparable to the absolute, intelligible plenum
of Cartesian extension, fascinates me as the pure appearance
of the not-me. What I wish precisely- is that this in-itse^
might be a sort of emanation of myself while still remaining in
itself. This is the meaning even of the snowmen and snowballs
which children make; the goal is to “do something out of
snow”; that is, to impose on it a form which adheres so deep-
ly to the matter that the matter appears to exist for the sake of
the form. But if I approach, if I want to establish an appro-
priative contact with the field of snow, everything is
changed. Its scale of being is modified; it exists bit by bit in-
stead of existing in vast spaces; ' stains, brush, and crevices
come to individualize each square inch. At the same time
its solidity melts into water. I sink into the snow up to my
knees; if I pick some up with my hands, it turns to liquid
in my fingers; it runs off; there is nothing left of it. The in-
itself is transformed into nothingness. My dream of appro-
priating the snow vanishes at the same moment. Moreover 1
do not know what to do with this snow which I have just
come to see close at hand. I can not get hold of the field; I
can not even reconstitute it as that substantial total which
offered itself to my eyes and which has abruptly, doubly col-
lapsed.
To ski means not only to enable me to make rapid move-
ments and to acquire a technical skill, nor is it merely to
play^ by increasing according to my whim the speed or diffi-
culties of the course; it is also to enable me to possess this
field of snow. At present I am doing something to i/.^Xhat
means that by my very activity as a skier, I am changing the
matter and meaning of the snow. From the fact that now in
my course it appears to me as a slope to go down, it finds
again a continuity and a unity which it had lost. It is at the
moment connective tissue. It is included between two limit-
ing terms; it unites the point of departure with the point of
arrival. Since in the descent I do not consider it in itself, bit
by bit, but am always fixing on a point to be reached beyond
the , position which I now occupy, it does not collapse into
744 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
an infinity of individual details but is traversed toward the
point which I assign myself. This traversal^ is not only zp.
activity of movement; it is also and especially a synthetic
activity of organization and connection; I spread the skiing
field before me in the same way that the geometrician, accord-
ing to Kant, can apprehend a straight line only by drawing
one. Furthermore this organization is marginal and not focal;
it is not for itself and in itself that the field of snow is uni-
fied; the goal, posited and clearly perceived, the object of my
attention is the spot at the edge of the field where I shall
arrive. The snowy space is massed underneath implicitly; its
cohesion is that of the blank space understood in the interior
of a circumference, for example, when I look at the black
line of the circle without paying explicit attention to its sur-
face. And precisely because I maintain it marginal, implicit,
and understood, it adapts itself to me, I have it well in hand;
I pass beyond it toward its end just as a man hanging a
tapestry passes beyond the hamm er which he uses, toward
its end, which is to nail an arras on the wall.
No appropriation can be more complete than this instru-
mental appropriation; the synthetic activity of appropriation
is here a technical activity of utilization. The upsurge of the
snow is the matter of my act in the same way that the upswing
of the hammer is the pure fulfillment of the h amm ering. At
the same time I have chosen a certain point of view ia
order to apprehend this snowy slope: this point of view is a
determined speed, which emanates from me, which I can in-
crease or diminish as I like; through it the field traversed is
constituted as a definite object, entirely distinct from what it
would be at another speed. The speed organizes the ensembles
at will: a specific object does or does not form a part of a
particular group according to whether I have or have not
taken a particular speed. (Think, for example, of Provence
seen “on foot,” “by car,” “by train,” “by bicycle.” It offers
as many different aspects according to whether or not Beziers
is one hour, a morning’s trip, or two days distant from Nar-
bonne: that is, according to whether Narbonne is isolated
and posited for itself with its environs or whether it con-
stitutes a coherent group with Beziers and Sete, for. example.
In this last case Narbonne’s relation to the sea is directly
accessible to intuition; in the other it is denied; it can form
the object only of a pure concept.) It is I myself then who
give form to the field of snow by the free speed which I give
745
doing and having
myself. But at the same time I am acting upon my ma .
The speed is not limited to imposing a form on a matter given
from the outside; it creates its matter. The snow, which sank
under my weight when I walked, which melted into water
when I tried to pick it up, solidifies suddenly under the ac-
tion of my speed;' it supports me. It is- not that I have lost
sight "Of its lightness, its non-substantiality, its perpetual
evanescence. Quite the contrary. It is precisely that lightness,
that evanescence, that secret liquidity which hold me up; that
is, which condense and melt in order to support me. This
is because I hold a special relation of appropriation with the
snow: sliding. This relation we will study later in detail.
But at the moment we can grasp its essential meaning. We
think of sliding as remaining, on the surface. This is inexact;
to be sure, 1 only skim the surface, and this skimming in it-
self is worth a whole study. Nevertheless I realize a synthesis
which has depth. I realize that the bed of snow organizes it-
self in its lowest depths in order to hold me up; the sliding
is action at a distance; At assures my mastery over the material
without my needing' to plunge into that material and engulf
myself in it in order to overcome it. To slide is the opposite
of taking root. The root is already half assimilated into the
earth which nourishes it; it is a living concretion of the earth;
it can utilize the earth only by making itself earth; that is,
by submitting itself, in a sense, to the matter which it wishes
to utilize. Sliding, on the contrary, realizes a material unity in
depth without penetrating farther than the surface; it is
like the dreaded master who does not need to insist nor to
raise his voice in order to be obeyed. An admirable picture of
power. From this comes that famous advice: “Slide, mortals,
don’t bear down!” This does not mean “Stay on the surface,
don’t go deeply into things,” but on the contrary, “Realize
syntheses in depth without compromising yourself.”
Sliding is appropriation precisely because the synthesis of -
support realized by the speed is valid only for the slider and
during the actual time when he is sliding. The solidity of the
snow is effective only for me, is sensible only to me; it is a
secret which the snow releases to me alone and which is al-
ready no longer true behind my back. Sliding realizes a strictly
individual relation with matter, an historical relation* the
matter reassembles itself and solidifies in order to hold me up
and It falls back exhausted and scattered behind me Thus bv
my passage I have realized that which is unique for me. The
746 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ideal for sliding then is a sliding which does not leave any
trace. It is sliding on water with a rowboat or motor boat or
especially with water skis which, though recently invented,
represent from this point of view the ideal limit of aquatic
sports. Sliding on snow is already less perfect; there is a trace
behind me by which I am compromised, however light it may
be. Sliding on ice, which scratches the ice and finds a matter
already organi 2 ed, is very inferior, and if people continue fo
do it despite all- this, it is for other reasons. Hence that slight
disappointment which always sekes us when we see behind us
the imprints which our skis have left on the snow. How much
better it would be if the snow re-formed itself as we passed
over it! Besides when we let ourselves slide down the slope, we
are accustomed to the illusion of not making any mark; we
ask the snow to behave like that water which secretly it is.
Thus the sliding appears as identical with a continuous crea-
tion. The speed is comparable to consciousness and here sym-
bolizes consciousness.'^ While it exists, it effects in the material
the birth of a deep quality which lives only so long as the
speed exists, a sort of reassembling which conquers its indif-
ferent exteriority and which falls back like a blade of grass
behind the moving slider. The info rmin g unification and syn-
thetic condensation of the field of snow, which masses itself
into an instrumental organization, which is utilized, like the
hammer or the anvil, and which docilely adapts itself to an
action which understands it and fulfills it; a continued and
creative action on the very matter of the snow; the solidifica-
tion of the snowy mass by the sliding; the similarity of the
snow to the water which gives support, docile and without
memory, or to the naked body of the woman, which the caress ^
leaves intact and troubled in its inmost depths — such is the
action of the skier on the real. But at the same time the snow
remains impenetrable and out of reach; in one sense the action
of the skier only develops its potentialities. The skier makes it
produce what it can produce; the homogeneous, solid matter
releases for him a solidity and homogeneity only through the
act of the sportsman, but this solidity and this homogeneity
dwell as properties enclosed in the matter. This synthesis of
self and not-self which the sportsman’s action here realizes is
expressed, as in the case of speculative knowledge .and the
work of art, by the afiSrmation of the right of the skier over
the snow. It is my field of snow; I have traversed it a hundred
^ We have seen in Part Three the relation of motion to the for-itself.
DOING AND HAVING 747
times, a hundred times I have through my speed effected the
birth of this force of condensation and support; it is mine.
To this aspect of appropriation through sport, there
must be added another — a difficulty overcome. It is more
generally understood, and we shall scarcely insist on it here.
Before descending this snowy slope, I must climb up it.
And this ascent has offered to me another aspect of the snow
— resistance. I have realized this resistance through my
fatigue, and I have been able to measure at each instant the
progress of my victory. Here the snow is identical with
the Other, and the common expressions “to overcome,”
“to conquer,” “to master,” etc. indicate suflSciently that it
is a matter of establishing between me and the snow the
relation of master to slave. This aspect of appropriation
which we find in the ascent exists also in swimming, in
an obstacle course, etc. The peak on which a flag is planted
is a peak which has been appropriated. Thus a principal
aspect of sport — and in particular of open air sports — is
the conquest of these enormous masses of water,' of earth,
and of air, which seem a priori indomitable and unutiliz-
able; and in each case it is a question of possessing not the
element for itself, but the type of existence in-itself which
is expressed by means of this element; it is the homogeneity
of substance which we wish to possess in the form of-
snow; it is the impenetrability of the in-itself and its non-
temporal permanence which we wish to appropriate in^ the '
form of the earth or of the rock, etc. Art, science, play
are activities of appropriation, either wholly or in part, and
what &ey want to appropriate beyond the concrete object
of their quest is being itself, the absolute being of the in-
itself.
^ Thus ontology teaches us that desire is originally a de-
sire of being and that it is characterized as the free lack of
being. But it teaches us also that desire is a relation with
a concrete existent in the midst of the world and that this
existent is conceived as a type of in-itself; it teaches us that
the relation of the for-itself to this desired in-itself is appro-
priation. We are, then, in the presence of a double deter-
mination of desire: on the one hand, desire is determined
as a desire to be a certain being, .which is the in-itself-for-
itself and whose existence is ideal; on the other hand, desire
is determined in the vast majority of cases as a relation
with a contingent and concrete in-itself which it has the
748 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
project of appropriating.^ Does one of these determinations ’
dominate the other? Are the two characteristics compatible?
Existential psychoanalysis can be assured of its principles
only if ontology has given a preliminary definition of the
relation of these two beings — ^the concrete and contingent
in-itself or object of the desire, and the in-itself-for-itself
or ideal of the desire — and if it has made explicit the relation
which unites appropriation, as a tji^e of relation to the in-
itself, to being, as a type of relation to the in-itself-for-itself.
This is what we must attempt at present.
What is meant by “to appropriate”? Or if you prefer,
what do we understand by possessing an object? We have
seen the reducibility of the category “to do,” which allows
us to see in it at one time “to be” and at another “to have.”
Is it the same with the category “to have”?
It is evident that in a great number of cases, to possess an
object is to be able to use it. However, I am not satisfied
with this definition. In this cafe I use this plate and this
glass, yet they are not mine. I can not “use” that picture
which hangs on my wall, and yet it belongs to me. The
right which I have in certain cases to destroy what I pos-
sess is no more decisive. It would be purely abstract to define
ownership by this right, and furthermore in a society with
a “planned economy” an owner can possess his factory with-
out having the right to close it; in imperial Rome the mas-
ter possessed his slave but did not have the right to put
him to death. Besides what is meant here by the right to
destroy, the right to use? I can see that this right refers me
to the social sphere and that ownership seems to be defined
within the compass of life in society. But I see also that the
right is purely negative and is limited to preventing another
from destroying or using what belongs to me. Of course
we could try to define ownership as a social function. But
first of all, although society confers in fact the right to
possess according to certain rules, it does not follow that
it creat^ the relation of appropriation. At the very most it
makes it legal. If ownership is to be elevated to the rank
of the sacred, it must first of all exist as a relation sponta-
neously established between the forritself and the concrete in-
itself. E we can imagine the future existence of a more just
collective organization, where individual possession will
8 Except where there is simply a desire to be— the desire -to be happy, to
be strong, etc.
. DOING AND HAVING ' 749
cease to be protected and sanctified at least within certain
limits— this does not mean that the appropriative tie will
cease to, exist; it can remain indeed by virtue of a private
relation of men to things. Thus in primitive societies where
the matrimonial bond is not yet a legal one and where
hereditary descent is still matrilineal, the sexual tie exists
at the very least as a kind of concubinage. It is neces-
sary then to distinguish between possession and the right
to possess. For the same reason I must reject any definition
of the type which Proudhon gives — such as “ownership is
theft”— for it begs the question. It is possible of course
for private property to be the product of theft and for &e
holding of this property to have for its result the robbing
of another. But whatever may be its’ origin and its results,
ownership remains no less capable of description and defi-
nition in itself. The thief considers himself the owner of the
money which he has stolen. Our problem then includes
describing the precise relation of the thief to the stolen
. goods as well as the relation of the lawful owner to proper-
ty “honestly acquired.”
If I consider the object which I possess, I see that the
quality of being possessed does not indicate a purely exter-
nal denomination marking the object’s external relation to
me; on the contrary, this quality affects its very depths;
It appears to me and it appears to others as making a part
of the . object’s being. This is why primitive societies
say of certain individuals that they are “possessed”; the
“possessed” are thought of as belonging to. .. . This is
also the significance of primitive funeral ceremonies where
the dead are buried with the objects which belong to them.
The rational explanation, “so that they can use the objects,”
is evidently after the event. It is more probable that at the
period when this kind of custom appeared spontaneously,
no explanation seemed to be required. The objects had
the specific quality belonging to the deceased. They formed
a whole with him; there was no more question of burying
me dead 'man without his usual objects than of burying
him without one of his legs. The corpse, the cup from
which the dead man drank, the knife which he used make
' ^person. The custom of burning widows in
2ry well be included under this princ’
rn possessed; the dead man takes
death. In' the eyes of the co
750 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
law she is dead; the burning is only to help her' pass from
this legal death to death in fact. Objects which can not
be put in the grave are haunted. A ghost is only the con-
crete materialization of the idea that the house and furnish-
ings “are possessed.” To say that a house is haunted means
that neither money nor effort will efface the metaphysical,
absolute fact of its possession by a former occupant. It is
true that the ghosts which haunt ancestral castles are de-
graded Lares. But what are these Lares if not layers of
possession which have been deposited one by one on the
walls and furnishings of the house? The very expression which
designates the relation of the object to its owner indicates
sufficiently the deep penetration of the appropriation; to be
possessed means to be for someone (etre a .. .). This means
that the possessed object is touched in its being. We have
seen moreover that the destruction of the possessor involves
the destruction of the right of the possessed and inversely
the survival of the possessed involves the survival of the
right of the possessor. The bond of possession is an inter-
nal bond of being. I meet the possessor in and through
the object which he possesses. This is evidently the explana-
tion of the importance of relics; and we mean by this not
only religious relics, but also and especially the totality of
the property of a famous man in which we try to rediscover
him, the souvenirs of the beloved dead which seem to
“perpetuate” his memory. (Consider, for example, the Vic-
tor Hugo Museum, or the “objects which belonged” to
Balzac, to Flaubert.)
This internal, ontological bond between the possessed and
the possessor (which customs like branding have often
attempted to materialize) can not be explained by a “realistic”
theory of appropriation. If we are right in defining realism
as a doctrine which makes subject and object two indepen-
dent substances possessing existence for themselves and by
themselves, then a realistic theory can no more account
for appropriation than it can for knowledge, which is one of
the forms of appropriation; both remain external relations
uniting temporarily subject and object. But we have seen that
a substantial existence must be attributed to the object
known. It is the same with ownership in general; the possessed
object exists in itself, is defined by permanence, non-tem-
porality, a sufficiency of being, in a word by substantiality.
Therefore we must put U nselbstandigkeit on the side of the
doing and having
751
possessing subject A substance can^no^app^opriate anote
substance, and if we app because originally the
quality of ‘‘being possessed,^^^ !^ t^rin-itself! which is
internal relation of the for insufficiency of being
ownership, derives its orig object possessed is
“ J bv f Tt S appropSn^ any more
not really affected by t ^owledge. It remains
than the object known is aff V ig ^ human ■
untouched (except in cases w e P quality on the
being, like a slave or ideally
part o£ the possessed does not affect its me^mg ‘a y
in the least; in a word, its meaning is to reflect this posses
Sion to tllC for-itsclf* i+a/l intSl***
H the possessor and the possesgd ate
nal relation based on the insufficiency oJ ’’cmg m
for-itselt. we must tty to determine ffie ^
ing of the dyad which they form. In possessor
tion is synthetic and effects the unification
and the possessed. This means that the ,
possessed constitute ideally a unique reality. ^
to be united with the object possessed m
appropriation; to wish to possess is to wish o , ,
to an object in this relation. Thus the desire of a particular
object is not the simple desire of this object, it is^ e ^ esn
to be united with the object in an internal relation, m me
mode, of constituting with it the unity “possessor-possessed.
The desire to have is at bottom reducible to the desire to e
related to a certain object in a certain relation of being.
In determining this relation, observations made earlier
on the behavior of the scientist, the artist, ^d the sports-
man will be very useful to us. We discovered in the behavior
of each one a certain appropriate attitude, and the appro-
priation in each case was marked by the fact that the object
appeared simultaneously to be a kind of subjective emana-
tion of ourselves and yet to remain in an indifferently exter-
nal relation with us. The “mine” appeared to us then as
a relation of being intermediate between the absolute
interiority of the me and the absolute exteriority of the not-
me. There is within the same syncretism a self becoming
not-self and a not-self becoming self. But we must describe
this relation more carefully. In the project of possession we
meet a for-itself which is “Vnselbstandig" separated by a
nothingness from the' possibility which it ' is. This pos-
752 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS .
sibility is the possibility of appropriating the object. We
meet in addition a value which haunts the for-itself and
which stands as the ideal indication of the total being which
would be realized by the union in identity of the possible
and the for-itself which is its possible; I' mean here the
being which would be realized if I were in the indissoluble
unity of identity — ^myself and my property. Thus appro-
priation would be a relation of being between a for-
itself and a concrete in-itself, and this relation would be
haunted by the ideal indication of an identification between
this for-itself and the in-itself which is possessed.
To possess means to have for myself; that is, to be the
unique end of the existence of the object If possession is
entirely and concretely given, the possessor is the raison
d’etre of the possessed object I possess this pen; that means
this pen exists for me, has been made for me. Moreover
originally it is I who make for myself the object which I
want to possess. My bow and arrows — ^that means the ob-
jects which I have made for myself. Division of labor can
dim this original relation but can not make it disappear.
Luxury is a degradation of it; in the primitive form of lux-
ury I possess an object which I have had made {done) for
myself by people belonging to me (slaves, servants bom in
the house). Luxury therefore is the form of ownership
closest to primitive ownership; it is this which next to
ownership itself throws the most light on the relation of
creation which originally constitutes appropriation. This re-
lation in a society where the division of labor is pushed to
the limit is hidden but not suppressed. The object which
I possess is one which I have bought. Money represents
my strength; it is less a possession in itself than an instru-
ment for possessing.^ That is why except in most unusual
cases of avarice, money is effaced before its possibility
for purchase; it is evanescent, it is made to unveil the
object, the concrete thing; money has only a transitive being.
But to me it appears as a creative force: to buy an object
is a symbolic act which amounts to creating the object. That
is why money is synonymous with power, not only because it
is in fact capable of procuring for us what we desire, but espe-
cially because it represents the effectiveness of my desire as
such. Precisely because it is transcended toward the thing, sur-
passed, and^ simply implied, it represents my magical bond
With the object. Money suppresses the technical connection
doing and having
=a: atr™ r iS.“S
lishes a bond of appropriation between
the total collection of objects m the world. By means of
money desire as such is already informer and creator.
Thus through a continuous degradation, the bond oi crea-
tion is maintained' between subject and object. To have is
first to create.' And the bond of ownership which is. estab-
lished then is a bond of continuous creation^ the object
possessed is inserted by me into the total form of my envi-
ronment; its existence is determined by my situation and by
its integration in that same situation. My lamp is not only
that electric bulb, that shade, that wrought iron st^nd;
it is a certain power of lighting this desk, these books, this
table; it is. a certain luminous nuance of my work at night
in connection with my habits 'of reading or writing late;
it is animated, colored, defined by the use which I make
of it; it is that use and exists only through it. If isolated
from my desk, from my work, and placed in a lot of objects
on the floor of a salesroom, my lamp is radically extin-
guished; it is no longer my lamp; instead merely a member of
the class of lamps, it has returned to its original matter.
Thus I am responsible for the existence of my possessions
in the human order. Through ownership I raise them up
to a certain type of. functional being; and my simple life
appears to me as creative exactly because by its continuity
it perpetuates the quality of being possessed in each of the
objects in my possession. I draw the collection of my sur-
roundings into being along with myself. If they are taken
from me, they die as my arm would die if it were severed
from me.
But the original, radical relation of creation is a relation of
emanation, and the difficulties encountered by the Cartesian
theory of substance are there to help us discover this relation,
nvfif ^ me— if by creating we mean to bring
existence. The tragedy of the absolute
existed, would be the impossibility of getting
self Wh whatever he created could be only him-'
1 creation derive any objectivity and in-
wn ot .nania could close it off from my presence, but in
754 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
order for this same inertia to function, I must sustain it in ex-
istence by a continuous creation. Thus to the extent that I
appear to myself as creating objects by the sole relation of
appropriation, these objects are myself. The pen and the pipe,
the clothing, the desl . the house — are myself. The totality of
my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I
have. It is I mvself which I touch in tois cup, in this trin-
ket. This mountaii' which I climb is myself to the extent that
I conquer it; and when I am at its summit, which I have
“achieved” at the cost of this same effort, when I attain this
magnificent view of the valley the surrounding peaks,
then I am the view; the panorama is myself dilated to the
horizon, for it exists only through me, only for me.
But creation is an evanescent concept which can exist
only through it' movement. If we stop it, it disappears. At the
extreme limits of its acceptance, it is annihilated; either I find
only my pure subj< ctivity or else I encounter a naked, indiffer-
ent materiality which no longer has any relation to me. Crea-
tion can be conceived and maintained only as a continued
transition from one term to the other. As the object rises up
in my world, it must simultaneously be wholly me and wholly
independent of me. This is what we believe that we are realiz-
ing in possession The possessed object as possessed is a con-
tinuous creation but still it remains there, it exists by itself;
it is in-itself. If 1 turn away from it, it does not thereby cease
to exist; if I go away, it represents me in my desk, in my
room, in this place in the world. From the start it is impen-
etrable. >This pen is entirely myself, at the very point at which
I no longer even distinguish it from the act of writing, which
is my act. And yet. on the other hand, it is intact; my owner-
ship does not change it; there is only an ideal relation between
it and me. In a sense I enjoy my ownership ifT surpass it to-
ward use, but if I wish to contemplate it, the bond of possession
is effaced, I no longer understand what it means to possess,
^e pipe there on the table is independent, indifferent. I pick
it up, I feel it. 1 contemplate it so as to realize this appropri-
ation; but just because these gestures are meant to give me
the enjoyment of this appropriation, they miss their mark. I
have merely an inert, wooden stem between my fingers. It is
only when I pass beyond my objects toward a goal, when I
utilize them, that I can enjoy their possession.
T^us the relation of continuous creation encloses withm it
as its implicit contradiction the absolute, in-itself indepen-
755
DOING AND HAVING
dence of the objects created. Possession is a magical relation;
l am these objects which I possess, but outside, so to speak
facing myself; I create them as independent of me; what 1
possess is mine outside of me, outside all subjectivity, as an
in-itself which- escapes me at each instant and whose creation
at each instant I perpetuate. But precisely because I am always
somewhere outside of myself, as an incompleteness which
makes its being known to itself by what it is not, now when I
possess, 1 transfer myself to the object possessed. In the
tion of possession the dominant term is the object possessed,
without it I am nothing save a nothingness which possesses,
nothing other than pure and simple possession, an incom-
pleteness, an insufficiency, whose sufficiency and completion
are there in that object. In possession, I am my own founda-
tion in so far , as I exist in an in-itself. In so far as possession
is a continuous creation, I apprehend the possessed object as
founded, by' me in its being; On the other hand, in so far as
creation is emanation, this object is reabsorbed in me, it is
only myself. Finally, in so far as it is originally in itself, it is
not-me, it is myself facing myself, objective, in itself, perma-
■ nent, impenetrable, existing in relation to me in the relation of
exteriority, of -indifference. Thus I am the foundation for my-
self in so far as I exist as an indifferent in-itself in relation to
myself. But this is precisely the project of the in-itself -for-itself.
For this ideal being is defined as an in-itself which, for-itself,-
would be its own foundation, or as a for-itself whose original
project would not be a mode of being, but a being precisely
the being-in-itself which it is. We see that appropriation is
nothing save the symbol of the ideal of the for-itself or value.
The dyad, for-itself possessing and in-itself possessed, is the
same as that being which is in order to possess itself and
whose possession is in its own creation — God. Thus the pos-
sessor aims at enjoying his being-in-itself, his being-outside.
Through possession I recover an object-being identical with
my being-for-others. Consequently the Other can not sur-
prise me; the being which he wishes to bring into the world,
which is myself-for-the-Other — this being I already enjoy
possessing. Thus possession is 1% addition a defense against
others. What is mine is myself in a non-subjective form inas-
much as I am its free foundation.
We can not insist too strongly on the fact that this relation
is symbolic and ideal My original desire of being my own
foundation for myself is never satisfied through appropriation
•756 ' BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
any more than Freud’s patient satisfies his Oedipus complex
when he dreams that a soldier kills the Czar (i.e., his father).
This is why ownership appears to the owner simultaneously as
something given at one stroke in the eternal and as requiring
an infinite time to be realized. No particular act of utilization
really realizes the enjoyment of full possession; but it refers to
other appropriative acts, each one of which has the value of an
incantation. To possess a bicycle is to be able first to look
at it, then to touch it. But touching is revealed as being in-
sufiicient; what is necessary is to be able to get on the bicycle
and take a ride. But this gratuitous ride is likewise insufficient;
it would be necessary to use the bicycle to go on some
errands. And this refers us to longer uses and more complete,
to long trips across France. But these trips themselves disinte-
grate into a thousand appropriative behavior patterns, each
one of which refers to others. Finally as one could foresee,
handing over a bank-note is enough to make the bicycle be-
long to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this pos-
session. In acquiring the object, I perceive that possession is
an enterprise which death always renders still unachieved.
Now we can understand why; it is because it is impossible
to realize the relation symbolized by appropriation. In itself
appropriation contains nothing concrete. It is not a real
activity (such as eating, drinking, sleeping) which could serve
in addition as a symbol for a particular desire. It exists, on
the contrary, only as a symbol; it is its symbolism which
gives it its meaning, its coherence, its existence. There can be
found in it no positive enjoyment outside its symbolic
value; it is only the indication of a supreme enjoyment of pos-
session (that of the being which would be its own founda-
tion), which is always beyond all the appropriative conduct
meant to realize it.
This is precisely why the recognition that it is impossible
to possess an object involves for the for-itself a violent
urge to destroy it. To destroy is to reabsorb into myself; it is
to enter along with the being-in-itself of the destroyed object
into a relation as profound as that of creation. The flames
which burn the farm which I myself have set on fire, gradu-
ally effect the fusion of the farm with myself. In annihilating
it I am changing it into myself. Suddenly I rediscover the
relation of being found in creation, but in reverse; I am the
foundation of the barn which is burning; I am this barn since
I am destroying its being. Destruction realizes appropriation
757
doing and having
nerhaos more keenly than creation does, for the object de-
Loyed is no longer there to show itself impenetoable. It has
? onA tiiPL cnfficiencv of being of the in-itself
and translucency of the nothingness which I am, smce it no
longer -exists. This glass which I have broken and which
“was” on this table is there still, but as an absolute trans-
parency. I see all beings superimposed. This is what movie
producers have attempted to render by overprinting the nlin.
The destroyed object resembles a consciousness although it
has the irreparability of the in-itself. At the same time it is
positively mine because the mere fact that I have to be what
I was keeps the destroyed object from being annihilated. I
re-create it by re-creating myself; thus to destroy is to re-
create by assuming oneself as solely responsible for the being
of what existed for all. ' '
Destruction then is to be given a, place among appropriative
behaviors. Moreover many kinds of appropriative conduct
have a destructive structure along with other structures. To
utilize is to use. In making use of my bicycle, I use it up —
•wear it out; that is, continuous appropriative creation is
marked by a partial destruction. This wear .can cause distress
for strictly practical reasons, but in the majority of cases it
brings a secret joy, almost like the joy of possession; this is
because it is coming from us — ^we are consuming. It should
be noted that the word “consume” holds the double meaning
of an appropriative destruction and an alimentary enjoyment.
To consume is to annihilate and it is to eat; it is to destroy
by incorporating into oneself. If I ride on my bicycle, I can
be annoyed at wearing out its tires because it is diEBcult to
find others to replace them; but the image of enjoyment which
my body invokes is that of a destructive appropriation, of a
cre^ion-destruction.” The- bicycle gliding along, carrying
me, by its very movement is created and made mine; but this
creation is deeply imprinted on the object by the light, con-
jmued wear which is impressed on it and which is like the
rand on &e slave. The object is mine because it is I who
of my ^ reverse side
These remarks will enable us to understand better the
“worfmn/ Sn
“dressed ^ anything new;" what is new is
ed up because it does not belong to anybody.
758
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
meaning of certain feelings or behavior ordinarily considered
as irreducible; for example, generosity. Actually the gift is a
primitive form of destruction. We know for example that the
potlatch involves the destruction of enormous quantities of
merchandise. These destructions are forbidden to the Other;
the gifts enchain him. On this level it is indifferent whether
the object is destroyed or given to another; in any case the
potlatch is destruction and enchaining of the Other. I destroy
the object by giving it away as well as by annihilating it; I
suppress in it the quality of being mine, which constituted
it to the depths of its being; I remove it from my sight; I
constitute it — ^in relation to my table, to my room — as
absent; I alone shall preserve for it the ghostly, transparent
being of past objects, because I am the one through whom
beings pursue an honorary existence after their annihilation.
Thus generosity is above all a destructive function. The craze
for giving which sometimes seizes certain people is first and
foremost a craze to destroy; it is equivalent to an attitude of
madness, a “love” which accompanies the shattering objects.
But the craze to destroy which is at the bottom of generosity
is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon,
all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact
that I give it away; giving is a keen, brief enjoyment, almost
sexual. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one
gives; it is a destructive-appropriative contact. But at the same
time the gift casts a spell over the recipient; it obliges him to
re-create, to maintain in being by a continuous creation this
bit of myself which I no longer want, which I have just pos-
sessed up to its annihilation, and which finally remains only
as an image. To give is to enslave. That aspect of the gift does
not interest us here, for it concerns primarily our relations
with others. What we wish to emphasize is that generosity is
not.in'educible; to give is to appropriate by destruction while
utilizing this destruction to enslave another. Generosity then
K a feeling structured by the existence of the Other and in-
dicates a preference for appropriation by destruction. In this
way it leads us toward nothingness still rnore than toward the
in-itself (we have here a nothingness of in-itself which is
evidently itself in-itself but which as nothingness can sym-
bolize with the being which is its own nothingness). If then
existential psychoanalysis encounters evidence of generosity
in a subject, it must search further for his original project and
ask why the subject has chosen to appropriate by destruction
; DOING AND HAVING 759
rather than by creation. The answer to this question wilL re-
veal that original relation to being which constitutes the per-
son who is being studied. ^ ^ ^ xt. -j i
These observations aim only at bringing to light the ideal
character of the appropriative tie and the symbolic function
of all appropriative conduct. It is necessary to add that the
symbol is not deciphered by the subject himself. It has not
been prepared by a symbolic process in an unconscious but
comes from the very structure of being-in-the-world. We
have seen in the chapter devoted to transcendence that the
order of instruments in the world is the result of my project-
ing into the in-itself the image of my possibilities — ^that is,
of what I am — but that I could never decipher this worldly
image since it would require nothing less than reflective
scissiparity to enable me to consider myself in the pattern of
an object. Thus since the circuit of selfness is non-thetic
and consequently the identification of what I am remains
non-thematic, this “being-in-itself* of myself which the
world refers to as me is necessarily hidden from my
knowledge. I can only adapt myself to it in and -through
the approximative action which gives it birth. Consequently
to possess does not mean to know that one holds with the
object possessed a relation identified as creation-destruction;
rather to possess means to be in this relation or better yet
to be this relation. The possessed object has for us an
immediately apprehensible quality which transforms it entire-
ly — ^the quality of being mine — but this quality is in itself
strictly undecipherable; it reveals itself in and through action.
It makes clear that it has ^ particular meaning, but from
the moment that we want to withdraw a little in relation to
the object and to contemplate it, the quality vanishes without
revealing its deeper structure and its meaning. This with-
drawal indeed is itself destructive of the appropriative con-
nection. An instant earlier I was engaged in an ideal total-
ity, and precisely because I was engaged in my being, I could
not know it; an instant later the totality has been broken and
I can not discover the meaning of it in the disconnected
fragments which formerly composed it. This can be observed
in that contemplative experience called depersonalization
which certain patients have in spite of efforts to resist it.
We are forced then to have recourse to existential psycho-
analysis to reveal in each particular case the meaning of the
760 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
appropriative synthesis for which we have just determined
the general, abstract meaning by ontology.
It remains to determine in general the meaning of the
object possessed. This investigation should complete our
knowledge of the appropriative project. What then is it
which we seek to appropriate?
In the first place it is easy to see abstractly that we origi-
nally aim at possessing not so much the mode of being of an
object as the actual being of this particular object. In fact
it is as a concrete representative of being-in-itself that I
desire to appropriate it; that is, to apprehend that ideally I
am the foundation of its being in so far as it is a part of
myself and on the other hand to apprehend that empirically
the appropriated object is never valid in itself alone nor for
its individual use. No particular appropriation has any mean-
ing outside its indefinite extensions; the pen which I possess
is the same as all other pens; it is the class of pens which I
possess in it. But in addition I possess in it the possibility
of writing, of tracing with certain characteristic forms and
color (for I combine the instrument itself and the ink which
I use in it). These characteristic forms and color with their
meaning are condensed in the pen as well as the paper, its
special resistance, its odor, etc. With all possession there
is made the crystallizing synthesis which Stendhal has de-
scribed for the one case of love. Each possessed object which
raises itself on the foundation of the world manifests the
entire world, just as a beloved woman manifests the sky,
the shore, the sea which surrounded her when she appeared.
To appropriate this object is then to appropriate the world
symbolically. Each one can recognize it by referring to his'
own experience: for myself, I shall cite a personal example,
not to prove the point but to guide the reader in his inquiry.
Some years ago I brought myself to the decision not
to smoke anymore. The struggle was hard, and in truth, I
did not care so much for the taste of the tobacco which I
was going to lose, as for the meaning of the act of smoking.
A complete crystallization had been formed. I used to smoke
at the theater, in the morning while working, in the eve-
ning after dinner, and it seemed to me that in giving up
smoking I was going to strip the theater of its interest, the
evening meal of its savor, the morning work of its fresh ani-
mation. Whatever unexpected happening was going to meet
my eye, it seemed to me that it was fundamentally impover-
761
" ' ' DOING AND HAVING
ished from the moment that I could not welcome it while
smoking. To-be-capable-of-being-met-by-me-smoking: such
was the concrete quality which had been spread over every- -
thing. It seemed to me that I was going to snatch it away ^
from everything and that in the midst of this universal impov-
erishment, life was scarcely worth the effort. But to smoke
is an appropriative, destructive action. Tobacco is a symbol
of “appropriated” being, since it is destroyed in the rhythm
of my breathing, in a mode of “continuous destruction,’
since it passes into me and its change in myself is manifest-
ed symbolically by the transformation of the consumed solid
into smoke. The connection between the landscape seen
while I was smoking and this little crematory sacrifice was
such that as we have just seen, the tobacco symbolized the
landscape. This means then that the act of destructively
appropriating the tobacco w^ the symbolic equivalent of ,
destructively appropriating the entire world. Across the tobac-
co which I was smoking was the world which was burn-
ing, which was going up in smoke, which was being reab-
sorbed into vapor so as to re-enter into me. In order to main-
tain my decision not to smoke, I had to realize a sort of
decrystallization; that is, without exactly accountmg to myself
for what I was doing, I reduced the tobacco to being noth-
ing but itself — an herb which bums. I cut its symbolic ties
with the world; I persuaded myself that I was not taking
anything away from the play at the theater, from the land-
scape, from the book which I was reading, if I considered
then^ without my pipe; that is, I rebuilt my possession of
these objects in modes other than that sacrificial ceremony.
As soon as I was persuaded of this, my regret was reduced
to a very small matter; I deplored the thought of not
perceiving the odor of the smoke, the warmth of the bowl
between my fingers and so forth. But suddenly my regret
was disarmed and quite bearable.
pius^ what fundamentally we desire to appropriate in an
object is its being and it is the world. These two ends of
appropriation are in reality only one. I search behind the
phenomenon to possess the being of the phenomenon. But.
this bemg, as we have seen, is very different from the phe-
nomenon of being; it is being-in-itself, and. not only the
heing of a particular thing. It is not because there is here
a passage to the universal but rather the being considered
m Its concrete nudity becomes suddenly the being of the
762 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
totality. Thus the relation of possession appears to us
clearly: to possess is to wish to possess the world across a
particular object. And as possession is defined as the effort
to apprehend ourselves as the foundation of a being in so
far as it is ourselves ideally, every possessive project aims at
constituting the For-itself as the foundation of the world
or a concrete totality of the in-itself, and this totality is, as
totality, the for-itself itself existing in the mode of the in-
itself. To-be-in-the-world is to form the project of possess-
ing the world; that is, to apprehend the total world as that
which is lacking to the for-itself in order that it may become
in-itself-for-itself. It is to be engaged in a totality which is
precisely the ideal or value or totalized totality and which
would be ideally constituted by the fusion of the for-itself
as a detotal ized totality which has to be what it is, with the
world, as the totality of the in-itself which is what it is.
It must be understood of course that the project of the
for-itself is not to establish a being of reason, that is a
being which the for-itself would first conceive — ^form and
matter — and then endow with existence. Such a being ac-
tually would' he a pure abstraction, a universal; its con-
ception could not be prior to being-in-the-world; on the
contrary its conception would presuppose being-in-the-
world as it supposes the pre-ontological comprehension of
a being which is eminently concrete and present at the start,
which is the “there” of the first being-there of the for-
itself; that is the being of the world. The for-itself does not
exist so as first to think a universal and then determine it-
self in terms of concepts. It is its choice and its choice can
not be abstract without making the very being of the for-itself
abstract. The being of the for-itself is an individual venture,
and the choice must be an individual choice of a concrete
being. This applies, as we have seen, to the situation in gen-
eral. The choice of the for-itself is always a choice of a con-
crete situation in its incomparable uniqueness. But it is
true as well for the ontological meaning of this choice.
When we say that the for-itself is a project of being, we do
not mean that the being-in-itself which it forms the project
of being is conceived by the for-itself as a structure com-
mon to all existents of a certain type; its project is in no way
a conception, as we have seen. That which it forms the
project of being appears to it as an eminently concrete total-
ity; it is this particular being. Of course we can foresee in
doing and having ' ^63
tliis project the possibUities of a universalizing develop-
ment; but it is in the same way as we say of a love^at he
loves all women or all womanMnd m one woman. The for-
itself has the project of being the foundation of this con-
crete being, which, as we have just seen, can not be con-
ceived— tor the very reason that it is concrete; neither can
it be imagined, for the imaginary is nothingness and this
being is eminently being. It must exist; that is, it ™-^st
be encountered, but this encounter is identical with the
choice which ,the for-itself makes. The for-itself is an en-
countered-choice; that is, it is defined as a choice of found-
ing the being which it encounters. This means that the for-itself
as an individual enterprise is a choice of this world,
as an individual totality of being; it does not surpass it to-
ward a logical universal but toward a new concrete
“state” of the same world, in which being would be an in-
itself founded by the for-itself; that is, it surpasses it toward
a concrete-being-beyond-the-concrete-existing-being. Thus
being-in-the-world is a project of possessing this world,
and the value which haunts the for-itself is the concrete
indication of an individual being constituted by the syn-
thetic function of this for-itself and this world. Being, in
fact, whatever it may be, wherever it may come from and in
whatever mode we may consider it, whether it is- in-itself ““or
for-itself or the impossible ideal of in-itself-for-itself, is in
its original contingency an individual venture.
Now we can define the relations which unite the two
categories, to be and to have. We have seen that desire
can be originally either the desire to be or the desire to have.
But the desire to have is not irreducible. While the desire
to be bears directly on the for-itself and has the project of
conferring on it without intermediary the dignity of in-itself-
for-itself, the desire to have aims at the for-itself on, in,
and through the world. It is by the appropriation of the
world that the project to have aims at realizing the same
value as the desire to be. That is why these desires, which
can be distinguished by analysis, are in reality, inseparable.
It is impossible to find a desire to be which is not accom-
panied by a desire to have, and conversely. Fundamentally we
have to do with two ways of looking toward a single goal,
or if you prefer, with two interpretations of the same fun-
damental situation, the one tending to confer being on
the For-itself without detour, the other establishing the cir-
764
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
cuit of selfness; that is, inserting the world between the for-
itself and its being. As for the original situation, it is the
lack of being which I am; that is, which I make myself
be. But the being of which I make myself a lack is strict-
ly individual and concrete; it is the being which exists
already and in the midst of which I- arise as being its lack.
Thus the very nothingness which I am is individual and con-
crete, as being this nihilation and not any other.
Every for-itself is a free choice; each of its acts — the
most insignificant as well as the most weighty — expresses
this choice and emanates from it. This is what we have called
our freedom. We have now grasped the meaning of this
choice; it is a choice of being, either directly or by the appro-
priation of the world, or rather by both at once. Thus my
freedom is a choice of being God and' all my acts, all
my projects translate this choice and reflect it in a thousand
and one ways, for there is an infinity of ways of being and
of ways of having. The goal of existential psychoanalysis is
to rediscover through these empirical, concrete projects the
original way in which each man has chosen his being.
It remains to explain, someone will say, why- I choose to
possess the world through this particular object rather than
another. We shall reply that here we see the peculiar char-
acter of freedom.
Yet the object itself is not irreducible. Tn it we aim at its
being through its mode of being or quality. Quality — particu-
larly a material quality like the fluidity of water or the density
of a stone — is a mode of being and so can only pre-
sent being in one certain way. What we choose is a certain
way in which being reveals itself and lets itself be possessed.
The yellow and red, the taste of a tomato, or the wrinkled
softness of split peas are by no means irreducible givens-ac-
cording to our view. They translate symbolically to our
perception a certain way which being has of giving itself,
and we react by disgust or desire, according to how we see
being spring forth in one way or another from their surface.
Existential psychoanalysis must bring out the ontological
meaning of qualities.. It is only thus — and not by considera-
tions of sexuality — that we can explain, for example, cer-
tain constants in poetic “imaginations” (Rimbaud's “geolog-
ical, Poe’s fluidity of water) or simply the tastes of each
one, those famous tastes which we are forbidden to discuss
without taking into account that they symbolize in their
doing AND HAVING.-
765
way a whole
and that hence comes q ^ext proce'dure
o£ the man who has made of exis-
then is to sketch m ou i making suggestions for
tential psychoanalysis, ^ of a taste for
bitterness, and the rest.
in QUALITY AS A REVELATION OF
being
WHAT we must do is to attempt ^ psychoanalysis of thin^^
M. Bachelard has tried this and shown much talent m h s
last book, Water and Dreams. There is great promise m this
work; in particular the author has made a real ‘discovery
his “material imagination.” Yet in truth this term
tion does not suit us and neither does that attempt to loo
behind things and their gelatinous, solid, or fluid matter,
for the “images” which we project there. Perception,^ as 1
have shown elsewhere,^® has nothing in common with im^-
ination; on the contrary each strictly excludes the other, lo
perceive does not mean to assemble images by means oi sen
sations; this thesis, originating with the association theory in
psychology, must be banished entirely. Consequently psycho-
analysis will not look for images but rather will^ seek to
' explain the meaning which really belongs to things. Of
' course the “human” .meaning of sticky, of slimy, etc. does
not belong to the in-itself. But potentialities do not belong
to it either, as we have seen, and yet it is these which con-
stitute the world. Material meanings, the human sense of
needles, snow, grained wood, of crowded, of greasy, etc.,
are as real as the world, neither more nor less, and to come
into the world means to rise up in the midst of these mean-
ings. But no doubt we have to do here with a simple differ-
ence in terminology, M. Bachelard appears bolder and seems
to reveal the basis of his thought when he speaks in his
studies of psychoanalyzing plants or when he entitles one
of his works The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Actually he is
Vlmagmaire. 1940.
766 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
applying not to the subject but to things a method of
objective interpretation which does not suppose any previous
reference to the subject. When for instance I wish to deter-
mine the objective meaning of snow, I see, for example,
that it melts at certain temperatures and that this melting of
the snow is its death. Here we merely have to do with ob-
jective confirmation. When I wish to determine the
meaning of this melting, I must compare it to other ob-
jects located in other regions of existence but equally ob-
jective, equally transcendent — ^ideas, friendship, persons —
concerning which I can also say that they melt. Money melts
itt my hands. I am swimming and I melt in the water. Certain
ideas — ^in the sense of socially objective meanings — ^“snow-
ball” and others melt away.^^ We say, “How thin he has
become! How he has melted away!” (Comme il a fondul)
Doubtless I shall thus obtain a certain relation binding cer-
tain forms of being to certain others.
It is important to compare the melting snow to certain
other more mysterious examples of melting. Take for exam-
ple the content of certain old myths. The tailor in Grimm’s
fairy tales takes a piece of cheese in his bands, pretends it
is a stone, squeezes it so hard that the whey oozes out of it;
his assistants believe that he has made a stone drip, timt
he is extracting the liquid from it. Such a comparison in-
forms us of a secret liquid quality in solids, in the sense in
which Audiberti by a happy inspiration spoke of the se-
cret blackness of milk. This liquidity which ought to be com-
pared to the juice of fruit and to human blood — which is to
man something like his own secret and vital liquidity — this
liquidity refers us to a certain permanent possibility which the
“granular compact” (designating a certain quality of the
being of the pure in-itself) possesses of changing itself into
homogeneous, undifferentiated fluidity {another quality of the ,
being of the pure in-itself). We apprehend here in its origin
and with all its ontological significance the polarity of
continuous and discontinuous, the feminine and masculine
poles of the world, for which we shall subsequently see
the dialectical development all the way to the quantum
theory and wave mechanics. Thus we shall succeed in de-
ciphering the secret meaning of the snow, which is an onto-
logical meaning.
But in aU this where is the relation to the subjective? To
”We may recall also the “melting money” of Daladier.
DOING AND HAVING
767
imagination? All we have done is to compare strictly objec-
tive structures and to formulate the hypothesis which can
unify and group these structures. That is why psychoanalysis
depends here on the things themselves, not upon men.
That is also why I should have less confidence than M. Bache-
lard in resorting at this level to -the material imaginations
of poets, whether Lautreamont, Rimbaud, or Poe. To be
sure, it is fascinating to look for the “Bestiary of Lautrea-
mont.” But actually if in this research we have returned to
the subjective, we shall attain results truly significant only if we
consider Lautreamont as an original and pure preference
for animality and if we have first determined the objective
meaning of animality.^^ fact if Lautreamont is what he pre-
fers, it is necessary first to understand the nature of what he
prefers. To be sure, we know well that he is going “to
put” into the animal world something different and more
than I put into it. But the subjective enrichments which
inform us about Lautreamont are polarized by the objective
structure of animality. This is why the existential psycho-
analysis of Lautreamont supposes first an interpretation of
the objective meaning of animal. Similarly I have thought
for a long time of establishing a lapidary for Rimbaud.
But what meaning would it have unless we had previously
established the significance of the geological in general?
It will be objected that a meaning presupposes man. We
do not deny this. But man, being transcendence, establish-
es the meaningful by his very coming into the world, and
the meaningful because of the very structure of transcendence
is a reference to other transcendents which can be inter-
preted without recourse to the subjectivity which has estab-
lished it. The potential energy of a body is an objective
quality of that body which can be objectively calculated
while taking into account unique objective circumstances.
And yet this energy can come to dwell in a body only in a
world whose appearance is a correlate of that of a for-itself.
Similarly a rigorously objective psychoanalysis will discover
that deeply engaged in the matter of things there are other
potentialities which remain entirely transcendent even
though they correspond to a still more fundamental choice
of human reality, a choice of being.
That brings us to the second point in which we differ with
M. Bachelard. Certainly any psychoanalysis must have its
“One aspect of this animality is exacUy what Scheler caUs vital values.
768 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
orincioles a priori. In particular it must know what it is
FS /or, ox how will it be able to find it? But since
thfroal of its research can not itself be established by he
psychoanalysis, without faUing into a
L end must be the object of a postulate, either wt seek it
in experience, or we establish it by means of some other
discipLe. The Freudian libido is obviously a Post^
late; Adler’s will to power seems to fi®.
generalization from empirical data-— and in ^^ct it is t
vovy lack of method which allows him to disregard the ba^c
principles of a psychoanalytic method. M. Bachelard seems
to rely upon these predecessors; the postulate of sexuality
seems to dominate his research; at other times we are referred
to Death, to the trauma of birth, to the will to power. In short
his psychoanalysis seems more sure of its method than ot its
principles and doubtless will count on its results to enlighten
it concerning the precise goal of its research. But this is
to put the cart before the horse; consequences will never allow
us to establish the principle, any more than the summation
of finite modes will permit us to grasp substance. It appears
to us therefore that we must here abandon these empirical
principles or these postulates which would make man fl
priori a sexuality or a will to power, and that we should
establish the goal of psychoanalysis strictly from the stand-
point of ontology. This is what we have just attempted
We have seen that human reality, far from being capable
of being described as libido or will to power, is a
of being, either directly or through appropriation ot tne
world. And we have seen — ^when the choice is
through appropriation — that each thing is chosen m
last analysis, not for its sexual potential but depending on
the mode in which it renders being, depending on the man^
ner in which being springs forth from its surface. A psy
choanalysis of things and of their matter ought above
to be concerned with establishing the way in
thing is the objective symbol of being and of the mla i
of human reality to this being. We do not deny that
should discover afterwards a whole sexual symbolisrn
nature, but it is a secondary and reducible stratum, vwic
supposes first a psychoanalysis of pre-sexual structures. l
M. Bachelard’s study of water, which abounds in ingeniou
and profound insights, will be for us a set of suggestions,
a precious collection of materials which should now
DOING AND HAVING 769
utilized by a psychoanalysis which is aware of its own prin-
ciples.
What ontology can teach psychoanalysis is first of aU
the true origin of the meanings of things and their true
relation' to human reality. Ontology alone in fact can take its
place on the plane of transcendence and from a single view-
point apprehend being-in-the-world with its two terms, be-
cause ontology alone has its place originally in the perspec-
tive of the cogito. Once again the ideas of facticity and
situation will enable us to understand the existential sym-
bolism of things. We have seen that it is in theory possible
but in practice impossible to distinguish facticity from the
project which constitutes it in situation. This observation
can be of use to us here; we have seen that there is no ne-
cessity to hold that the “this” has any meaning whatever
when considered in the indifferent exteriority of its being
and independently from the upsurge of the for-itself. Ac-
tually its quality, as we have seen, is nothing other than its
being. The yellow of the lemon, we said, is not a sub-
jective mode of apprehending the lemon; it is the lemon.
We have shown also that the whole lemon extends through-
out its qualities and that each one of the qualities is spread
over the others; that is what we have correctly called “this.’’^^
Every quality of being is all of being; it is the presence
of its absolute contingency; it is its indifferent irreduci-
bility. Yet in Part Two we insisted on the inseparability
of project and facticity in the single quality. “For in order
for there to be quality, there must be being for a nothingness
which by nature is not being. . . . Quality is the whole
of being unveiling itself within the limitation of the there
is." Thus from the beginning we could not attribute the
meaning of a quality to being-in-itself, since the “there
is” is already necessary; that is, the nihilating mediation
of the for-itself must be there in order for qualities to be
there. But it is easy to understand in view of these remarks
that the meaning of quality in turn indicates something as
a re-enforcement of “there is,” since we take it as our support
in order to surpass the “there is” toward being as it is
absolutely and in-itself.
In each apprehension of quality, there is in this sense
a metaphysical effort to escape from our condition so as to
pierce through the shell of nothingness about the “there is”
13 Part Two, Chapter Three, Section III.
being and nothingness
to penetrate to the P-
apprehend quahty oriy^ f/r^olally thero\e£ore us; in
o?‘ the Se ‘“s” is CMStituted which is the meaningful
"ie!
Mo^^being;" anTtbkt moChyl
achieve and disclose by psychoanalysis. ‘ wrinkled?
teal purport of yellow, of red, of polished, or wr^teor
And a/ter these elementary quesUons, what is the ““'“P^y
teal coefficient of lemon, of water, of od,
analysis must resolve all these problems if it wants to undet
stand someday why Pierre likes oranges nnd has a horr
of water why he gladly eats tomatoes and refuses to eat
beam why he vomits if he is forced to swallow oysters or
We have shown also, however, the error '’^*uh
make by believing that we “proi'=«” °'f “f "‘i™.
tions on the thing, to illuminate it or color it First, m ot
seen early in the discussion, a feelmg is not an mn
position hnt an objective, transcending relaUon which h ^
as its object to learn what it is. But this is not al •
explanation by projection, which is found ^^in such
sayings as “A landscape is a spiritual state, ^ jj^y
the question. Take for example that partic jt
which we call “slimy.”^‘ Certainly ior the European aduK^^
signifies a host of human and a'
can easily be reduced to relations of being. A
smile, a. thought, a feeling can be slimy. The comm
ion is that first I have experienced certain t>ehavior an
tain moral attitudes which displease me and whicri x
demn, and that in addition I have a sensory mtuitio ^
“slimy.” Afterward, says the ^eory, I should is
connection between these feelings and slimines ,
slimy would function as a symbol of a whole clas
feelings and attitudes. I would then have enriched th
i*Tr. French visqueux. This at times comes closer to the ®"Slish ‘ sdckjj, ^
but I have consistently used the word “slimy” m
figurative meaning of “slimy” appears to bo identical m bou
DOING AND HAVING 771
by projecting upon it my knowledge with respect to that
human- category of behavior.
But how are we to accept this explanation by projection?
If we suppose that we have first grasped the feelings as pure
psychic qualities, how will we be able to grasp their relation
to the slimy? A feeling apprehended in its qualitative pu-
rity will be able to reveal itself only as a certain purely
unextended disposition, culpable because of its relation to
certain values and certain consequences; in any case it will
not “form an' image” unless the image has been given first.
On the other hand if “slimy” is not originally charged with
an affective meaning, if it is given only as a certain mate-
rial quality, one does not see how it could ever be chosen as
a symbolic representation of certain psychic unities. In a
word, if we are to establish consciously and clearly a sym-
bolic relation between sliminess and the sticky baseness of
certain individuals, we must apprehend baseness already in
sliminess and sliminess in certain baseness. Consequently
the explanation by projection explains nothing since it
takes for granted what it ought to explain. Furthermore
even if it escaped this objection on principle, it would have
to face another, drawn from experience and no less serious;
the explanation by projection implies actually that the pro-
jecting subject has arrived by experience and analysis at a
certain knowledge of the structure and affect of the attitudes
which he calls slimy. According to this concept the recourse
to sliminess does not as knowledge enrich our experience
of human baseness. At the very most it serves as a thematic
unity, as a picturesque rubric for bits of knowledge already
acquired. On the other hand, sliminess proper, considered in
its isolated state, will appear to us harmful in practice (be-,
cause slimy substances stick to the hands, and clothes, and
because they stain), but sliminess then is not repugnant.
In fact the disgust which it inspires can be explained only
by the combination of this physical quality with certain
moral^ qualities. There would have to be a kind of appren-
ticeship for learning the symbolic value of “slimy.” But
observation teaches us that even very young children show
evidence of repulsion in the presence of something slimy,
as if it were already combined with the psychic. We know
also that from the time they know how to talk, they under-
stand the .value of the words “soft,” “low,” etc., when ap-
plied to the description of feelings. All this comes to pass
772 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
as if we come to life in a universe where feelings and acts
are all charged with something material, have a substantial j
stuff, are really soft, dull, slimy, low, elevated, etc., and
in which material substances have originally a psychic mean-
ing which renders them repugnant, horrifying, alluring, etc.
No explanation by projection or by analogy is acceptable
here. To sum up, it is impossible to derive the value of j
the psychic symbolism of “slimy” from the brute quality of !
the this and equally impossible to project the meaning of 1
the this in terms of a knowledge of psychic attitudes. How
then are we to conceive of this immense and universal sym-
bolism which is translated by our repulsion, our hates, our
sympathies, our attractions toward objects whose materiality
must on principle remain non-meanmgful? To progress in
this study it is necessary to abandon a certain number of
postulates. In particular we must no longer postulate
a priori that the attribution of sliminess to a particular
feeling is only an image and not knowledge. We must also
refuse to admit — until getting fuller information — that the
psychic allows us to view the physical matter symbolically
or that our experience with human baseness has any prior-
ity over the apprehension of the “slimy” as meaningful.
Let us return to the original project. It is a project of
appropriation. It compels the slimy to reveal its being; since
the upsurge of the for-itself into being is appropria-
tive, the slimy when perceived is “a slimy to be possessed”;
that is, the original bond between the slimy and » myself
is that I form the project of being the foundation of its
being, inasmuch as it is myself ideally. From the start then
it appears as a possible “myself” to be established; from the
start it has a psychic quality. This definitely does not mean
that I endow it with a soul in the manner of primitive
animism, nor with metaphysical virtues, but simply that
even its materiality is revealed to me as having a psychic
meaning — this psychic meaning, furthermore, is identical
wi& the symbolic value which the slimy has in relation to
faeing-in-itself. This appropriative way. of forcing the slimy
to produce all its meanings can be considered as a form^
a priori, although it is a free project and although it
is identified with the being of the for-itseif. In fact
the appropriative mode does not depend originally on the
mode of ' being of the slimy but only on its brute being
there, on its pure encountered existence; it is like any other
773
DOING AND HAVING
encounter since it is a simple project of appropriation, since
it is not distinguished in any way from the pure there is
and since it is, according to whether we consider it from
one point of view or the other, either pure freedom or
pure nothingness.' But it is precisely, within the limits of this
appropriate project that the slimy reveals itself and
develops* its siiminess. From the first appearance of the slimy,
this si imin ess is already a response to a demand, already a
bestowal of self; the slimy appears as already the outline
of a fusion of the world with myself. What it teaches me
about the world, that it is like a leech sucking me, is already
a reply to a concrete questionj it responds with its very
being, with its mode of being, with all its matter. The re-
sponse which it gives is at the same time fully appropriate
to the question and yet opaque and indecipherable, for it is
rich with all its inexpressible materiality. It is clear inas-
much as the reply is exactly appropriate; the slimy lets
itself be apprehended as that which I lack; it lets itself be
examined by an appropriative inquiry; it allows its siiminess
to be revealed to this outline of appropriation. Yet it is opaque
because if the meaningful form is evoked in the slimy by the
for-itself, all its siiminess comes to succour and replenish it.
We are referred then to a meaning which is full and dense,
and this meaning releases for us jfirst being-in-itself in so far
as the slimy is at the moment that which is manifesting the
world, and second an outline of ourselves, in so far as the
appropriation outlines something like a founding act on
the part of the'slimy.
What comes back to us then as an objective quality is a
new nature which is neither material (and physical) / nor psy-
chic, but which transcends the opposition of the psychic
and the physical, by revealing itself to us as the ontological
> expression of the entire world; that is, which offers itself as a
rubric for classifying all the “thises” in the world, so that we
have to deal with -material organizations or transcended tran-
scendences. This means that the apprehension of the slimy as
such has, by the same stroke, created for the m-itself of the
world a particular mode of giving itself. In its own way it
symbolizes being; that is, so long as the contact with the slimy
endures, everything takes place for us as if siiminess were the
meaning of the entire world or the unique mode of being of
bemg-in-itself—m the same way as for the primitive clan of
lizards all objects are lizards.
774 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
What mode of being is symbolized by the slimy? I s®® &st
it is the homogenei^
tiie appearance of ^ similar to itself, which
:;TsSescap?s “f o^wSone can float, a being wto.
L" withV' memory, which eternaliy ts « .mo
itself on which one leaves no mark and which c(mld n
a mik on us. a being which slides and
slide which can be possessed by something slidmg ( y
boat a motor boat, or water ski), and *Weh»^v“
because it rolls over us, a being
infinite temporality because it is a PffP®t«al
anything which changes, a being which best symbolizes
this synthesis of eternity and f "'re
of the for-itself as pure temporality and the m-itself a p
eternity. But immediately the slimy reveals itself ^ ^ssenh^y
ambiguous because its fluidity exists in slow moUon; toere is
a sticky thickness in its liquidity; it represents m i
dawning triumph of the solid over the
a tendency of the indifferent in-itself, which is represented
by the pure solid, to fix the liquidity, to absorb the for-itseJi
which ought to dissolve it. ,
Slime is the agony of water. It presents itself as ^
nomenon in process of becoming; it does not have e p
manence within change that water has but on the 5^
resents an accomplished break in a change of state. 1 ^
instability in the slimy discourages possession. Water is mor
fleeting, but it can be possessed in its very flight s
thing fleeing. The slimy flees with a heavy flight whicU
the same relation to water as the unwieldy earthbound ig
the chicken has to that of the hawk. Even this Ihgm ,
be possessed because it denies itself as flight. It is a
almost a solid permanence. Nothing testifies more clear y
ambiguous character as a “substance^ in between two ® ^ .
than the slowness with which the slimy melts m^o i e •
drop of water touching the surface of a large body of wa
instantly transformed into the body of water; we do n
the operation as buccal absorption, so to speak, of ®,. • _
of water by the body of water but rather' as a spun u
and breaking down of the individuality of
which is dissolved in the great All from which it had
The symbol of the body of water seems to play a very imp
DOING AND HAVING 775
•V
tant role in the construction of pantheistic systems; it reveals
a particular type of relation of being to being. But if we con-
sider the slimy, we note that it presents a constant hysteresis
in the phenomenon of being transmuted into itself. The honey
which slides off my spoon on to the honey contained in the
jar first sculptures the surface by fastening itself on it in
relief, and its fusion with the whole is presented as a gradual ,
sinking, a collapse which appears at once as a deflation (think
for example of children’s pleasure in playing with a toy which
whistles when inflated and groans mournfully when deflat-
ingi5) and a spreading out — ^like the flattening of the full
breasts of a woman who is lying on her back.
In the slimy substance which dissolves into itself there is
a visible resistance, like the refusal of an individual who
does not want to be annihilated in the whole of being, and
at the same time a softness pushed to its ultimate limit. For
the soft is only an annihilation which is stopped halfway;
soft is what furnishes us with the best image of our own
destructive power • and its limitations. The slowness of the
disappearance of the slimy drop in the bosom of the whole is
grasped first in softness, which is like a retarded annihilation
and seems to be playing for time, but this softness lasts up
to the end; the drop is sucked into the body of the slimy sub-
stance. This phenomenon gives rise to several characteristics
of the slimy. First it is soft to touch. Throw water on the
ground; it runs. Throw a slimy substance; it draws itself out,
it displays itself, it flattens itself out, it is soft; touch the
- slimy; it does not flee, it yields. There is in the very fact that
we can not grasp water a pitiless hardness which gives to it a
secret sense of being metal; finally it is incompressible like
steel. The slimy is compressible. It gives us at first the im-
pression that it is a being which can be possessed. Doubly so:
its sliminess, its adherence to itself prevent it from escaping;
I can take it in my hands, separate a certain quantity of honey
or of pitch from the rest of the jar, and thereby create an
individual object by a continuous creation; but at the same
time the softness of this substance which is squashed in my
15 Although slime has mysteriously preserved all fluidity in slow motion, it
must not be confused with purges where fluidity, roughly outlined, undergoes
abrupt breaks and blocks and where the substance, after a preliminary plan
of pouring, rolls abruptly head over heels.
i«Tr. In the original the reference is to gold-beater’s skin, a thin mem-
brane used in making gold leaf.
776 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
hands gives me the impression that I am perpetually destroy-
ing it.
Actually we have here the image of destruction-creation.
The slimy is docile. Only at the very moment when I believe
that I possess it, behold by a curious reversal, it possesses me.
Here appears its essential character: its softness is leech-like.
If an object which I hold in my hand is solid, I can let go
when I please; its inertia symbolizes for me my total power;
I give it its foundation, but it does not furnish any foundation
for me; the For-itself collects ihe In-itself in the object and
raises the object to the dignity of the In-itself without com-
promising itself (i.e., the self of the For-itself) but always
remaining an assimilating and creative power. It is the For-
itself which absorbs the In-itself. In other words, possession
asserts the primacy of the For-itself in the synthetic being “In-
itself-For-itself.” Yet here is the slimy reversing the terms; the
For-itself is suddenly compromised. I open my hands, I want
to let go of the slimy and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks
at me. Its mode of being is neither the reassuring inertia of
the solid nor a dynamism like that in water which is exhausted
in fleeing from me. It is a soft, yielding action, a moist and
feminine sucking, it lives obscurely under my fingers, and I
sense it like a dizziness; it draws me to it as the bottom of a
precipice might draw me. There is something like a tactile
fascination in the slimy. I am no longer the master in arrest-
ing the process of appropriation. It continues. In one sense it
is like the supreme docility of the possessed, the fidelity of a
dog who gives himself even when one does not want him
any longer, and in another sense there is underneath this
docility a surreptitious appropriation of the possessor by the
possessed.
Here we can see the symbol which abruptly discloses itself:
there exists a poisonous possession; there is a possibility that
the In-itself might absorb the For-itself; that is, that a being
might be constituted in a manner just the reverse of the
“In-itself-For-itself,” and that in this new being the In-itself
would draw the For-itself into its contingency, into its indif-
ferent exteriority, into its foundationless existence. At this
instant I suddenly understand the snare of the slimy: it is a
fluidity which holds me and which compromises me; I can
not slide on this slime, all its suction cups hold me back; it
can not slide over me, it clings to me like a leech. The sliding
however is not simply denied as in the case of the solid; it is
777
DOING AND HAVING
degraded. The slimy seems to lend itself ’
for a body of slime at rest is not noticeably d^mct from a
body of very dense liquid. But it is a trap. The sliding is
sucked in by the sliding substance, and it leaves its traces
upon me. The slime is like a liquid seen in a nightmare, where
all its. properties are, animated by a sort of life and turn back
against me. Slime is the revenge of the In-itself. A sicWy-
sweet, feminine revenge which will be symbolized on another
. level by the quality “sugary.” This is why the sugar-like sweet-
ness to the taste — an indelible sweetness, which remams indei-
initely in the mouth even after swallowing-— perfectly com-
pletes the essence of the slimy. A sugary sliminess is the ideal
of the slimy; it symbolizes the sugary death of the For-itself
(like that of the wasp which sinks into the jam and drowns
in it).
But at the same time the slimy is myself, by the very fact
that I outline an appropriation of the slimy substance. That
sucking of the slimy which I feel on my hands outlines a kind
of continuity of the slimy substance in myself. These long
soft- strings of substance which fall from me to the slimy body
(when, for example, I plunge my hand into it and then pull
it out again) symbolize a rolling off of myself in the slime.
And the hysteresis which I establish in the fusion of the ends
of these strings with the larger body symbolizes the resistance
of my being to absorption into the In-itself. If I dive into the
water, if I plunge into it, if I let myself sink in it, I experience
no discomfort, for I do not have any fear whatsoever that
I may dissolve in it; I remain a solid in its liquidity. If I sink
in the slimy, I feel that I am going to be lost in it; that is, that
I may dissolve in the slime precisely because the slimy is in
process of solidification. The sticky would present the same
aspect as the slimy from this point of view, but it does not
' 'have the same fascination, it does not compromise because it is
inert. In the very apprehension of the slimy there is a gluey
substance, compromising and without equilibrium, like the
haunting memory of a metamorphosis.
To touch the slimy is to risk being dissolved in sliminess.
Now this dissolution by itself is frightening enough, because
It IS the absorption of the For-itself by the In-itself as ink is
absorbed by a blotter. But it is still more frightening in that
the metamorphosis is not just into a thing (bad as that would
be) but into slime. Even if I could conceive of a liquefaction
ot myself (that is, a transformation of my being into water) I
778
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
would not be inordinately alfected because water is the symbol
of consciousness — its movement, its fluidity, its deceptive ap-
pearance of being solid, its perpetual, flight — everything in it
recalls the For-itself; to such a degree that psychologists
who first noted the characteristics of duration of conscious-
ness (James, Bergson) have very often compared it to a . river.
A river best evokes the image of the constant interpenetration
of the parts by a whole and their perpetual dissociation and
free movement.
But the slimy offers a horrible image; it is horrible in
itself for a consciousness to become slimy. This is because the
being of the slimy is a soft clinging, there is a sly solidarity
and complicity of all its leech-like parts, a vague, soft effort
made by each to individualize itself, followed by a falling
back and flattening out that is emptied of the individual,
sucked in on all sides by the substance. A consciousness which
became slimy would be transformed by the thick stickiness of
its ideas. From the time of our upsurge into the world, we are
haunted by the image of a consciousness which would like to
launch forth into the future, toward a projection of self, and
which at the very moment when it was conscious of arriving
there would be slyly held back by the invisible suction of the
past and which would have to assist in its own slow dissolu-
tion in this past which it was fleeing, would have to aid in the
invasion of its project by a thousand parasites until finally it
completely lost itself. The “flight of ideas” found in the psy-
chosis of influence gives us the best image of this horrible
condition. But what is it then which is expressed by this fear
on the ontological level if not exactly the flight of the For-it-
self before the In-itself of facticity; that is, exactly temporali-
zation. The horror of the slimy is the horrible fear that time
might become slimy, that facticity might progress continually
and insensibly and absorb the For-itself which exists it. It is
the fear not of death, not of the pure In-itself, not of nothing-
ness, but of a particular type of being, which does not actually
exist any more than the In-itself-For-itself and which is only
represented by the slimy. It is an ideal being which I reject
with all my strength and which haunts me as value haunts my
eing, ^ an ideal being in which the foundationless , In-itself ,
has priority over the For-itself. We shall call it an Aniivalue.
^ Thus in the project of appropriating the slimy, the sliminess
as a symbol of an antivalue: it is a type
® eing not realized but threatening .which will perpetually
779
DOING AND HAVING
haunt consciousness as the constant danger which it is fleeing,
and hence will suddenly transform the project of appropri^
tion into a project of flight. Something has appeared which
is not the result of any prior experience but only of the pre-
ontoiogical comprehension of the In-itself and -the For-itseu,
and this is the peculiar meaning of the slirny. In one sense it
is an experience since sliminess is an intuitive discovery; in
another sense it is like the discovery of an adventure of being.
Henceforth for the For-itself there appears a new danger, a
threatening mode of being which must be avoided, a concrete
category which it will discover everywhere. The slimy does not
symbolize any psychic attitude a priori; it manifests a certain
relation of being with itself and ^is relation has originally a
psychic quality because I have discovered it in a plan of ap-
propriation and because the sliminess has returned my image
to me. Thus I am enriched from my first contact with the
slimy, by a valid ontological pattern beyond the distinction
between psychic and non-psychic, which will interpret the
meaning of being and of all the existents of a certain' category,
this category arising, moreover, like an empty skeletal frame-
work before the experience with different kinds of sliminess.
I have projected it into the world by my original project when
faced with the slimy; it is an objective structure of the world
and at the same time an antivalue; that is, it determines an
area where slimy objects will arrange themselves. Henceforth
each time that an object will manifest to me this relation of
being, whether it is a matter of a handshake, of a smile, or of
a thought, it will be apprehended by definition as slimy; that
is, beyond its phenomenal context, it will appear to me as
constituting along with pitch, glue, honey, etc,, the' great
ontological region of sliminess.
Conversely, to the extent that the this which I wish to
appropriate represents the entire world, the slimy, from my
first intuitive contact, appears to me rich with a host of ob-
scure meanings and references which surpass it. The slimy is
revealed in itself as “much more than the slimy.” From the
moment of its appearance it transcends all distinctions be-
tween psychic and physical, between the brute existent and
&e meanings of the world; it is a possible meaning of being.
The &st experience which the infant can have with the slimy
enriches him psychologicaUy and morally; he will not need
to reach adultjiood to discover the kind of sticky baseness
which we figuratively name “slimy”; it is there near him in ' -
780 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
the very sliminess of honey or of glue. What we say concern-
ing the slimy is valid for all the objects which surround the
child. The simple revelation of their matter extends his hori-
zon to the extreme limits of being and bestows upon him at
the same stroke a collection of clues for deciphering the being
of all human facts. This certainly does not mean that he
knows from the start the “ugliness,” the “characteristics,” or
the “beauties” of existence. He is merely in possession of all
the meanings of being of which ugliness and beauty, attitudes,
psychic traits, sexual relations, etc, will never be more than
particular exemplifications. The gluey, the sticky, the hazy,
etc., holes in the sand and in the earth, caves, die light, the
night, etc . — all reveal to him modes of pre-psychic and pre-
sexual being which he will spend the rest ' of his life ex-
plaining. There is no such thing as an “innocent” child. We
will gladly recognize along with the Freudians the innumer-
able relations existing between sexuality and certain matter and
forms in the child’s environment. But we do not understand
by this that a sexual instinct already constituted has charged
them with a sexual significance. On the contrary it seems to us
that this matter and these forms are apprehended in them-
selves, and they reveal to the child the For-itself’s modes of
being and relations to being which will illuminate and shape
his sexuality.
To cite only one example — many psychoanalysts have
been struck by the attraction which all kinds of holes exert on
the child (whether holes in the sand or in. the ground, crypts,
hollows, or whatever), and they have explained this attrac-
tion either by the anal character of infant sexuality, or by
prenatal shock, or by a presentiment of the adult sexual act.
But we can not accept any of these explanations. The idea
of “birth trauma” is highly fantastic.' The comparison of the
hole to the feminine sexual organ supposes in the child an
experience which he can not possibly have had or a presenti-
ment which we can not justify. As for the child’s anal sexuali-
ty, we would not think of denying it; but if it is going to
illuminate the holes which he encounters in the perceptual
field and charge them with symbolism, then it is necessary
that the child apprehend his anus as a hole. To put it more
clearly, the child would have to apprehend the essence of A®
hole, of the orifice, as corresponding to the sensation which
he receives from his anus. But we have demonstrated suf-
ficiently the subjective character of “my relation with my
781
DOING AND HAVING
body” so that we can understand the impossibility of saying
that the child apprehends a particular part of his body as an
objective structure of the universe. It is only to another per-
son that the anus appears as an orifice. The child himself can
never have experienced it as such; even the intimate care
which the mother gives the child could not reveal the anus in
this aspect, since the anus as an erogenous zone, or a zone of
^ pain, is not provided with tactile nerve endings. On the con-
trary it is only through another — ^through the words which
the mother uses to designate the child’s body — that he learns
that his anus is a hole. It is therefore the objective nature of
the hole perceived in the world which is going to illuminate
for him the objective structure and the meaning of the anal
zone and which will give a transcendent meaning to the
erogenous sensations which hitherto he was limited to merely
“existing.” In itself then the hole is the symbol of a mode of
being which existential psychoanalysis must elucidate.
We can not make such a detailed study here. One can see
at once, however, that the hole is originally presented as a
nothingness -'“to be filled” with my own flesh; the child can
not restrain himself from putting his finger or his whole arm
into the hole. It presents itself to me as the empty image of
myself. I have only to crawl into it in order to 'make myself
exist in the world which awaits me. The ideal of the hole is
then an excavation which can be carefully moulded about my
flesh in such a manner that by squeezing myself into it and
fitting myself tightly inside it, I shall contribute to making a
fullness of being exist in the world. Thus to plug up a hole
means originally to make a sacrifice of my body in order that
the plenitude of being may exist; that is, to subject the
passion of the For-itself so as to shape, to perfect, and to
preserve the totality of the In-itself.i^
Here at its origin we grasp one of the most fundamental
tendencies of human reality — ^the tendency to fill. We shall
nieet with this tendency again in the adolescent and in the
^ plugging up
holes, m filling empty places, in realizing and symbolically
establishing a plenitude. The child recognizes as the results
experiences that he himself has holes. When he
puts his fingers in his mouth, he tries to wall up the holes in
IS face; he expects that his finger will merge with his lips
« We should note as well the importance of the opposite tendency to noV.>
through holes, which in itself demands an existenuS^ anSysS
782 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
and the roof of his mouth and block up the buccal orifice as
one fills the crack in a wall with cement; he seeks again the
density, the uniform and spherical plenitude of Parmenidean
being; if he sucks his thumb, it is precisely in order to dis-
solve it, to transform it into a sticky paste which will seal the
hole of his mouth. This tendency is certainly one of the most
fundamental among those which serve as the basis for the act
of eating; nourishment is the “cement” which will seal the
mouth; to eat is among other things to be filled up.
It is only from this standpoint that we can pass on to sexu-
ality. The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of every-
thing which “gapes open.” It is an appeal to being as all
holes are. In herself woman appeals to a strange flesh which is
to transform her into a fullness of being by penetration and
dissolution. Conversely woman senses her condition as an
appeal precisely because she is “in the form of a hole.” This
is the true origin of Adler’s complex. Beyond any doubt her
sex is a mouth and a voracious mouth which devours the
penis — a fact which can easily lead to the idea of castration.
The amorous act is the castration of the man; but this is
above all because sex is a hole. We have to do here with a
pre-sexual contribution which will become one of the com-
ponents of sexuality as an empirical, complex, human attitude
but which far from deriving its origin from the sexed being
has nothing in common with basic sexuality, the nature of
which we have explained in Part Three. Nevertheless the ex-
perience with the hole, when the infant sees the reality, in-
cludes the ontological presentiment of sexual experience in
general; it is with his flesh that the child stops up the hole and
the hole, before all sexual specification, is an obscene expec-
tation, an appeal to the flesh.
We can see the importance which the elucidation of these
immediate and concrete existential categories will assume for
existential psychoanalysis. In this way we can apprehend the
very general projects of human reality. But what chiefly in-
terests the psychoanalyst is to' determine the free project of
the unique person in terms of the individual relation which
unites him to these various symbols of being. I can love slimy
contacts, have a horror of holes, etc. That does not mean that
for me the slimy, the greasy, a hole, etc. have lost their general
ontological meaning, but on the contrary that because of this
meaning, I determine myself in this or that manner in relation
to them. If the slimy is indeed the symbol of a being in which
doing and having 783
the fof-itself is swallowed up by the in-itself, what kind of a
person am I if in encountering others, I love the slimy? To
what fundamental project of myself am. I referred J
explain this love of an ambiguous, sucking in-itself? In this
way tastes do not remain irreducible givens; if one knows how
to question them, they reveal to us the fundamental projects
of the person. Down to even our alimentary preferences they
all have -a meaning. 'We can account for this fact if we will
reflect that each taste is presented, not as an obsuxd datum
which we must excuse but as an evident value. If I like the
taste of garlic, it seems irrational to me that other people can
not like it. '
To eat is to appropriate by destruction; it is at the same
time to be filled up with a certain being. And this being is
given as a synthesis of temperature, density, and flavor prop-
er. In a word this synthesis signifies a certain being; and
when we eat, we do not limit ourselves to knowing certain
qualities of this being through taste; by tasting them we appro-
priate them. Taste is assimilation; by the very act of biting the
tooth reveals, the density of a body which it is transforming
into gastric contents. Tlius the synthetic intuition of food is
in itself an assimilative destruction. It reveals to me the being
which I am going to make my flesh. Henceforth, what I
accept or what I reject with disgust is the very being of that
existent, or if you prefer, the totality of the food proposes, to
me a certain mode of being of the being which I accept or
refuse. This totality is organized as a form in which less in-
tense qualities of density and of temperature are effaced be-
hind the flavor proper which -expresses them. The sugary,
for example, expresses the slimy when we eat a spoonful of
honey or molasses, just as an analytical function expresses a
geometric curve. This means that all qualities which are not
pictly speaking flavor but which are massed, melted, buried
in the flavor, represent the matter of the flavor. (The piece
of chocolate which at first offers a resistance to my tooth soon
abruptly gives way and crumbles; its resistance first, then its
crumbling is chocolate.) In addition they are united to certain
temporal characteristics of flavor; that is, to its mode of tem-
porahzation. Certain tastes give themselves all at once, some
are like delayed-action fuses, some release themselves by de-
grees, certain ones dwindle slowly until they disappear, and
at the very moment one thinks to possess
mem. These qualities are organized along with density and
784
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
temperature; in addition on another level they express the
visual aspect of the food. If I eat a pink cake, the taste of it
is pink; the light sugary perfume, the oiliness of the butter
cream are the pink. Thus I eat the pink as I see the sugary.
We conclude that flavor, due to this fact, has a complex archi-
tecture and differentiated matter; it is this structured matter
— ^which represents for us a particular type of being — that we
can assimilate or reject with nausea, according to our original
project. It is not a matter of indifference whether we like
oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to
unravel the existential significance of these foods.
Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclina-
tion. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of
being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and
classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely en-
abled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its
fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it. Each
human reality is at the same time a direct project to metamor-
phose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself and a proj-
ect of the appropriation of the world as a totality of being-in-
itself, in the form of a fundamental quality. Every human
reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to
found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself
which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the
Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the passion of
man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself
as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God
is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a use-
less passion.
Conclusion
■ I. IN-ITSELF AHD FOR-ITSELF; META-
PHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS
We are finally in a position to form conclusions. Already
in the Introduction we discovered consciousness as an- appeal
to being, and we showed that the cogito refers immediately to
a being-in-itself which is the obiect of consciousness. But
after our description of the In-itself and the For-itsen, it
appeared to us difficult to estabfish a bond between them,
and we feared that we might fall into an insurmountable
dualism. This dualism threatened us again in another way. In
fact to the extent that it can be said of the For-itseh that it is,
we found ourselves confronting two radically distinct^ modes
of being: that of the For-itself which has to be what it is i.e.,
which is what it is not and which is not what it is;; — ^d that
of the In-itself which is what it is. We asked then if the ffis-
covery of these two types of being had resulted in establishing
an hiatus which would divide Being (as a general category
belonging to all existents) into two incommunicable re^ons,
' in each one of which the notion of Being must be taken in an
original and unique sense.
Our research has enabled us to answer the first of these
questions: the For-itself and the In-itself are reunited by a
synthetic connection which is nothing other than the For-it-
self itself. The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure ni-
785
786
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
hilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole in being at the
heart of Being. One may be reminded here of that convenient
fiction by which certain popularizers are accustomed to illus-
trate the principle of the conservation of energy. If, they say,
a single one of the atoms which constitute the universe
were annihilated, there would result a catastrophe which
would extend to the entire universe, and this would be, in
particular, the end of the Earth and of the solar system. This
metaphor can he of use to us here. The For-itself is like a tiny
nihilation which has its origin at the heart of Being; and
this nihilation is sufficient to cause a total upheaval to hap-
pen to the In-itself. This upheaval is the world. The for-itself
has no reality save that of being the nihilation of being. Its
sole qualification comes to it from the fact that it is the
nihilation of an individual and particular In-itself and , not
of a being in general. The For-itself is not nothingness in
general but a particular privation; it constitutes itself as the
privation of this being. Therefore we have no business asking
about the way in which the for-itself can he united with the
in-itself since the for-itself is in no way an autonomous sub-
stance. As a nihilation it is made-to-be by the in-itself; as an
internal negation it must by means of the in-itself make
known to itself what it is hot and consequently what it
has to be. If the cogito necessarily leads outside the self, if
consciousness is a slippery slope on which one can not take
One’s stand without immediately finding oneself tipped outside
onto being-in-itself, this is because consciousness does not
have by itself any sufficiency of being as an absolute subjec-
tivity; from the start it refers to the thing.
For consciousness there is no being except for this precise
obligation to be a revealing intuition of something. What does
this mean except that consciousness is the Platonic Other?
We may recall the fine description which the Stranger in the
Sophist gives of this “other,”^ which can he apprehended
only “as in a dream,” which has" no being except its being-
other (i.e., which enjoys only a borrowed being), which if
considered by itself disappears and which takes on a marginal
existence only if, one fixes his look on being, this other which
is exhausted in being other than itself, and other than being. It
even seems that Plato perceived the dynamic character which
the otherness of the other presented in relation to itself, for in
1 Tr. “The other” in this passage must of course not be confused with “The
Other” discussed in connecuon with the problem of human relationships.
CONCLUSION
787
certain passages he sees in this the origin of motion. But he
could have gone still further; he would have seen then that
the other, or relative non-being, could have a semblance of
existence only by virtue of consciousness. To be other than
being is to be self-consciousness in the unity of the tempo-
ralizing ekstases. Indeed what can the otherness be if not that
game of musical chairs played by the reflected and the reflect-
ing which we described as at the heart of the for-itself? For
the only way in which the other can exist as other is to be
consciousness (of) being other. Otherness is, in fact, an in-
ternal negation, and only a consciousness can be constituted
as an internal negation. Every other conception of otherness
will amount to positing it as an in-itself — that is, establishing
between it and being an external relation which would necessi-
tate the presence of a witness so as to establish that the other
is other. &an the in-itself. However the other can not be other
without emanating from being; in this respect it is relative to
the in-itself. But neither can it be other without making itself
other; otherwise its otherness would become a given and
therefore a being capable of being considered in-itself. In so
far as it is relative to the in-itself, the other is affected with
facticity; in so far as it makes itself, it is an absolute. This is
what we pointed out when we said that the for-itself is not
the foundation of its being-as-nothingness-of-being but
that it perpetually founds its nothin gness-of -being. Thus the
for-itseff is an absolute Unselbstdndig, what we have called a
non-substantial absolute. Its reality is purely interrogative. If
it can posit questions this is because it is itself always in
question; its being is never given but interrogated since it is
always separated from itself by the nothingness of otherness.
The for-itself is always in suspense because its being is a per-
petual reprieve. If it could ever join with its being, then the
otherness would by the same stroke disappear and along with
it possibles, knowledge, the world. Thus the ontological prob-
lem of knowledge is resolved by the affirmation of the onto-
logical primacy, of the in-itself over the for-itself.
But this immediately gives rise to a metaphysical interroga-
tion. The upsurge of the for-itself starting from the in-itself is
m no way comparable to the dialectical genesis of the Platonic
Other starting from being. “Being” and “other” are, for Plato,
genera. But we, on' the contrary, have seen that being is an
individual venture. Similarly the appearance of the for-itself
IS f' bsolute event which comes' to being. There is therefore
788 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
room here for a metaphysical problem which could formu-
lated thus* Why does the for-itself arise m terms of being?
wt indeed apply the term “metaphysical” to the study of
individual processes which have given birth to this world as a
concrete and particular totality. In this sense metaphysics w
to ontology as history is to sociology. We have seen that it
would be absurd to ask why being is other, that the question
can have meaning only within the limits of a for-itself and
that it even supposes the ontological priority of nothingness
over being. It can be posited only -if combined with ^another
question which is externally analogous and yet very different:
Why is it that there is being? But we know now^ that we
must carefully distinguish between these two questions. The
first is devoid of meaning; all the “Whys” in fact are subse-
quent to being and presuppose it. Being is without reason,
without cause, and without necessity; the very definition of
being releases to us its original contingency. To the second
question we have already replied, for it is not posited on &e
metaphysical level but on that of ontology: “There is” being
because the for-itself is such that there is being. The charac-
ter of a phenomenon comes to being through the for-itself.
But while questions on the origin of being or on the ori-
gin of the world are either devoid of meaning or receive a
reply within the actual province of ontology, the case^ is not
the same for the origin of the for-itself. The for-itself is such
that it has the right to turn back on itself toward its own
origin. The being by which the “Why” comes into being has
the right to posit its own “Why” since- it is itself an interroga-
tion, a “Why.” To this question ontology can not reply, for
the problem here is to explain an event, not to describe the
structures of a being. At most it can point out that the noth-
ingness which is made-to-be by the in-itself is not a simple
emptiness devoid of meaning. The meaning of the nothingness
of the nihilation is to-be-made-to-be in order to found bemg.
Ontology furnishes us two pieces of information which serve
as the basis for metaphysics; first, that every process of a
foundation of the self is a rupturq in the identity-of-being of
the in-itself, a withdrawal by being in relation to itself and
the appearance of presence to self or consciousness. It is only
by making itself for-itself that being can aspire to be the cause
of itself. Consciousness as the nihilation of being appears
therefore as one stage in a progression toward the immanence
of causality — i.e., toward being a self-cause. The progression.
CONCLUSION
789
however, stops there as the result of the insufficiency of being
in the for-itself. The temporalization of consciousness is not
ah ascending progress toward the dignity of the causa sui; it
is a surface run-oif whose origin is, on the contrary, the im-
possibility of being a self -cause. Also the ens causa sui remains
as the lacked, the indication of an impossible vertical sur-
passing which by its very non-existence conditions the flat
movement of consciousness; in the same way the vertical at-
traction which the moon exercises on the ocean has for its re-
sult the horizontal displacement which is the tide. The second
piece of information which metaphysics, can draw from ontol-
ogy is that the for-itself is effectively a perpetual project of
founding itself qua being and a perpetual failure of this proj-
ect. Presence to itself with the various directions of its ni-
hilation (the ekstatic nihilation of the three temporal dimen-
sions, the twin nihilation of the dyad reflected-reflecting)
represents the primary upsurge of this project; reflection rep-
resents the splitting of the project which turns back on itself
in order to found itself at least as a project, and the aggrava-
tion of the nihilating hiatus by the failure of this project it-
self. “Doing” and “having,” the cardinal categories of human
reality, are immediately or mediately reduced to the project of
being. Finally the plurality of both can be interpreted as hu-
man reality’s final attempt to found itself, resulting in the
radical separation of being and the consciousness of being.
Thus ontology teaches us two things: (1) If the in-itself
were to found itself, it could attempt to do so only by mak-
ing itself consciousness; that is, the concept of causa sui in-
cludes within it that of presence to self — i.e., the nihilating
decompression of being; (2) Consciousness is in fact a proj-
ect of founding itself; that is, of attaining to the dignity of
the in-itself-for-itself or in-itself-as-self-cause. But we can not
derive anything further from this. Nothing allows us to affirm
the^ ontological level that the nihilation of the in-itself in
for-itself has for its meaning — ^from the start and at the very
heart of the in-itself — ^the. project of being its own self-cause.
Quite the contrary. Ontology here comes up against a pro-
found contradiction since it is through the for-itself that the
possibility of a foundation comes to the world. In order to be
a project of founding itself, the in-itself would of necessity
have to be originally a presence to itsejf — i.e., it would have
to be already consciousness. Ontology will therefore limit it- ,
self to declaring that everything takes place as if the in-itself
790
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
in a project to found itself gave itself the mddiflcation of
the for-itself. It is up to metaphysics to form the hypotheses
which will allow us to conceive of this^ process as the absc^
lute event which comes to crown the individual venture which
is the existence of being. It is evident that these hypotheses
wiU remain hypotheses since we can not expect either further
validation or invalidation. What wiU make their validity is
only the possibUity which they will offer us of unifying the
givens of ontology. This unification natmally must not be
constituted in the perspective of an historical becoming since
temporality comes into being through the for-itself. There
would be therefore no sense in asking what being was before
the appearance of the for-itself. But metaphysics must never-
theless attempt to determine the nature and the meaning of
this prehistoric process, the source of all history, which is the
articulation of the mdividual venture (or existence of &e in-
itself) with the absolute event (or upsurge of the for-itself).
In particular the task belongs to the metaphysician of de-
ciding whether the movement is or is not a first “attempt” on
the part of the in-itself to found itself and to determine what
are the relations of motion as a “malady of being” with the
for-itself as a more profound malady pushed to nihilation.
It remains for us to consider the second problem which
we formulated in our Introduction: If the in-itself and the
for-itself are two modalities' of being, is there not a hiatus at
the very core of the idea of being? And is its comprehension
not severed into two incommunicable parts by the very fact
that its extension is constituted by two radically heterogenoiw
classes? What is there in co mm on between the being which «
what it is, and the being which is what it is not and which is
not what it is? What can help us here, however, is the con-
clusion of our preceding inquiry. We have just shown in fact
that the in-itself and the for-itself are not juxtaposed. Quite
the contrary, the for-itself without the in-itself is a kind of
abstraction; it could not exist any more than a color could
exist without form or a sound without pitch and without
timbre. A consciousness which would be consciousness of
nothing would be an absolute nothing. But if consciousness
is bound to the in-itself by an internal relation, doesn’t this
mean that it is articulated with the in-itself so as to con-
stitute a totality, and is it not this totality which would^ be
given the name being or reality? Doubtless the for-itself is a
nihilation, but as a nihilation it is; and it is in a priori unity
CONCLUSION 791
with the in-itself. Thus the Greeks were accustomed to dis-
tinguish cosmic reality, which they called To ttov, from
the totdity constituted by this and by the infinite void which
surrounded it — a totality which they called To oAov. To be
sure, we have been able to call the for-itself a nothing and to
declare that there is “outside of the in-itself” nothing except
a reflection of this nothing which is itself polarized and de-
fined by the in-itself — ^inasmuch as the for-itself is precisely
the nothingness of this in-itself. But here as in Greek philoso-
phy a question is raised: which shall we call real? To' which
shall we attribute being? To the cosmos or to what we called
T6 oXov? To the pure in-itself or to the in-itself surrounded
by that shell of nothingness which we have designated by
the name of the for-itself?
But if we are to consider total being as constituted by the
synthetic organization of the in-itself and of the for-itself, are
we not going to encounter again the difficulty which we
wished to avoid? And as for that hiatus which we revealed in
the concept of being, are we not going to meet it at present in
the existent itself? What definition indeed are we to give to
an existent which as in-itself would be what it is and as for-
itself would be what it is not?
If we wish to resolve these difficulties, we must take into
account what is required of an existent if it is to be considered
as a totality: it is necessary that the diversity of its structures
be held within a unitary synthesis in such a way that each of
them considered apart is only an abstraction. And certainly
consciousness considered apart is only an abstraction; but the
imitself has no need of the for-itself m order to be; the
“passion” of the for-itself only causes there to be in-itself.
The phenomenon of in-itself is an abstraction without con-
sciousness but its being is not an abstraction.
If we wish to conceive of a synthetic organization such
that the for-itself is inseparable from the in-itself and con-
versely such that the in-itself is indissolubly bound to the for-
i^elf, we must conceive of this synthesis in such a way that
V would receive its existence from the nihilation
which caused there to be consciousness of it. What does this
mean if not that the indissoluble totality of in-itself and for-
itself is conceivable only in the form of a being which is its
own “self-cause”? It is this being and no other which could
be v^id absolutely as that 6Xov of which we spoke earlier.
And if we can raise the question of the being of the for-itself
792 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
articulated in the in-itself, it is because we define^ ourselves
a priori by means of a pre-ontological comprehension of the
ens causa sui. Of course this ens causa sui is impossible, znA
the concept of it, as we have seen,_ includes a contradiction.
Nevertheless the fact remains that since we raise the question
of the being of the o\ov by adopting the point of view of the
causa sui, it is from this point of view that we must se
about examining the credentials of this o\ov. Has it not
appeared due to the mere fact of the upsurge of the for-itselt,
and is not the for-itself originally a project of bemg its own
self-cause? Thus we begin to grasp the nature of total reality.
Total being, the concept of which would not be cleft by an
hiatus and which would nevertheless not exclude the nihilating-
nihilated being of the for-itself, that being whose exis-
tence would be a unitary synthesis of the in-itself and of con-
sciousness — ^this ideal being would be the in-itself founded y
the for-itself and identical with the for-itself which founds it
— i.e., the ens causa sui. But precisely because^ we adopt the
point of view of this ideal being in order to judge the real
being which we call . 6\ov, we must establish that the real is
an abortive effort to attain to the dignity of the self-cause.
Everything happens as if the world, man, and man-in-the-
world succeeded in realizing only a missing God. Everything
happens therefore as if the in-itself and the for-itself were pre-
sented in a state of disintegration in relation to an ideal syn-
thesis. Not that the integration has ever taken place but on
the contrary precisely because it is always indicated an
always impossible. .
It is this perpetual failure which explains both the indissol-
ubility of the in-itself and of the for-itself and at the same
time their relative independence. Similarly when the unity o
the cerebral functions is shattered, phenomena are produce
which simultaneously present a relative autonomy and
at the same time can be manifested only on the ground o
the disintegration of a totality. It is this failure whic
explains the hiatus which we encounter both in the concep
of being and in the existent. If it is impossible to pass
from the notion of being-in-itself to that of being-for-itse
and to reunite them in a common genus, this is because me
passage in fact from the one to the other and their reimitmg
can not be effected. We know that for Spinoza and for Hcge ,
for example, if a synthesis is arrested before its completion
and the terms fixed in a relative dependence and at the same
CONCLUSION
793
time in a relative independence, then the synthesis is constitut-
ed suddenly as an error. For example, it is m the notion
of a sphere that for Spinoza the rotatiori of a sermcircle around
its diameter finds its justification and its meanmg. But if we
imagine that the notion of a sphere is on prmciple out or
reach, then the phenomenon of the rotation of the semicircle
becomes false. It has been decapitated; the idea of rotation
and the idea of a circle are held together without being able
to be united in a synthesis which surpasses them and justifies
them; the one remains irreducible to the other. This is pre-
cisely what happens here. We shall say therefore that the
oXov we are considering is like a decapitated notion in per-
petual disintegration. And it is in the form of a disintegrated
ensemble that it presents itself to us in its ambiguity — that
so that one can ad libitum insist on the dependence of the
beings under consideration or on their independence. There is
here a passage which is not completed, a short circuit
On this level we find again that notion of d detotalized
totality which we have already met in connection with the
for-itself itself and in connection with the consciousness ^ of
others. But this is a third type of detotalization. In the simply
detotalized totality of reflection the reflective had to be the
reflected-on, and the reflected-on had to be reflected. The
double negation remained evanescent. In the case of the for-
others. the (reflection-reflecting) reflected was distinguished
from the (reflection-reflecting) reflecting in that each one
had to not-be the other. Thus the for-itself and the-other-for-
itself constitute a being in which each one confers the being-'
other on the other by making himself other. As for the totality
of the for-itself and the in-itself, this has for its characteristic
the fact that the for-itself makes itself other in relation to the
m-itself but that the in-itself is in no way other than the for-
itself in its being; the in-itself purely and simply is. If the
relation of the in-itself to the for-itself were the reciprocal of
the relation of the for-itself to the in-itself, we should fafl
into the case of being-for-others. But this is definitely not the
case, and it is this absence of reciprocity which characterizes
the oXov of which we spoke earlier. To this extent it is not
absurd to raise the -question of the totality. In fact when we
studied the for-others, we established that it was necessary that
there be a being which was an “other-me” and which had to
scissiparity of the for-others. But at the same
time this being which is an other-me appeared to us as being
794 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
able to exist only if it included an inapprehensible non-being
of exteriority. We asked then if the paradoxical character of
the totality was in itself an irreducible and if we could posit
the mind as the being which is and which is not. But we
decided that the question of the synthetic unity of conscious-
nesses had no meaning, for it presupposed that it was possible
for us to assume a point of view on the totality; actually we
exist on the foundation of this totality and as engaged in it.
But if we can not “adopt a point of view on the totality,”
this is because the Other on principle denies that he is I as I
deny that I am he. It is the reciprocity of the relation which
prevents me from ever grasping it in its integrity. In the case
of the internal negation for-itself-in-itself, on the contrary, the
relation is not reciprocal, and I am both one of the terms of
the relation and the relation itself. I apprehend being, 1 am
the apprehension of being, I am only an apprehension of
being. And the being which I apprehend is not posited
against me so as to apprehend me in turn; it is what is appre-
hended. Its being simply does not coincide in any way with
its being-apprehended. In one sense therefore I can pose the
question of the totality. To be sure, I exist here as engaged in
this totality, but I can be an exhaustive consciousness of it
since I am at once consciousness of the being and self-con-
sciousness. This question of the totality, however, does not
belong to the province of ontology. For ontology the only
regions of being which can be elucidated are those of the in-
itself, of the for-itself, and the ideal region of the “self-
cause.” For ontology it makes no difference whether we con-
sider the for-itself articulated in the in-itself as a well-
marked duality or as a disintegrated being. It is up to meta-
physics to decide which will be more profitable for knowledge
(in particular for phenomenological psychology, for anthro-
pology, etc.) : will it deal with a being which we shall caU
the phenomenon and which will be provided with two di-
mensions of being, the dimension in-itself and the dimension
for-itself (from this point of yiew there would be only one
phenomenon: the world), just as in the physics of Einstein it
has been found advantageous to speak of an event conceived
as having spatial dimensions and a temporal dimension and as
determining its place in a space-time; or, on the other hand,
will it remain preferable despite all to preserve the ancient
duality “consciousness'-being.” The only observation which
ontology can hazard here is that in case it appears useful to
CONCLUSION 795
employ the new notion of a phenomenon as a disintegrated
totality, it will be necessary to speak of it both in terras of
immanence' and in terras of transcendence. The danger, in
fact, would be of falling into either a doctrine of pure im-
manence (Husserlian idealism) or into one of pure transcen-
dence which would look on the phenomenon as a new kind
of object. But immanence will be always limited by the phe-
nomenon’s dimension in-itself, and transcendence will be
limited by its dimension for-itself .
After having decided the question of the origin of the
for-itself and of the nature of the phenomenon of the world,
the metaphysician will be able to attack various problems of
primary importance, in particular that of action. Action, in
fact, is to be considered simultaneously on the plane of the
for-itself and on, that of the in-itself, for it involves a project
which has an immanent origin and which determines a modi-
fication in the being of the transcendent. It would be of no
use to declare that the action modifies only the phenomenal
appearance of the thing. If the phenomenal appearance of a
cup can be modified up- to the annihilation of the cup qua
cup, and if the being of the cup is nothing but its quality,
then the action envisaged must be capable of modifying the
very being of the cup. The problem of action therefore sup-
poses the elucidation of the transcendent efficacy of conscious-
ness, and it puts us on the path of its veritable relation of
being with, being. It reveals to us also, owing to the repercus-
sions of an act in the world, a relation of being with being
which, although apprehended in exteriority by the physicist,
is neither 'pure exteriority nor immanence but which refers us
to the notion of the Gestalt form. It is therefore in these terms
that one might attempt a metaphysics of nature.
n. ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS
Ontology itself can not formulate ethical precepts. It is
concerned solely with what is, and we can not possibly derive
imperatives from ontology’s indicatives. It does, however,
allow us to catch a glimpse of what sort of ethics will assume
Its responsibilities when confronted with a human reality in
suuathn. Ontology has revealed to us, in fact, the origin and
the nature of value; we have seen that value is the lack in re-
lation to which the for-itself determines its being as a lack.
796 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
By the very fact that the for-itself exists, as we have seen,
value arises to haunt its being-for-itself. It follows that the
various tasks of the for-itself can be made-the object of an
existential psychoanalysis, for they all aim at producing the
missing synthesis of consciousness and being in the form of
value or self-cause. Thus existential psychoanalysis is moral
description, for it releases to us the ethical meaning of various
human projects. It indicates to us the necessity of abandoning
the psychology of interest along with any utilitarian interpre-
tation of human conduct — by revealing to us. the ideal
meaning of all human attitudes. These meanings are beyond
egoism and altruism, beyond also any behavior which is called
disinterested. Man makes himself man in order to be God,
and selfness considered from this point of view can appear to
be an egoism; but precisely because there is no common
measure between human reality and the self-cause which it
wants to be, one could just as well say that man loses himself
in order that the self-cause may exist. We will consider then
that all human existence is a passion, the famous self-in-
terest being only one way freely chosen among others to
realize this passion.
But the principal result of existential psychoanalysis must
be to make us repudiate the spirit of seriousness. The
spirit of seriousness has two characteristics: it considers values
as transcendent givens independent of human subjectivity,
and it transfers the quality of “desirable” from the ontologi-
cal structure of things to their simple material constitution.
For the spirit of seriousness, for example, bread is desirable
because it is necessary to live (a value written in an intelligi-
ble heaven) and because bread is nourishing. The result of the
serious attitude, which as we know rules the world, is to
cause the symbolic values of things to be drunk in by their
empirical idiosyncrasy as ink by a blotter; it puts forward the
opacity of the desired object and posits it in itself as a de-
sirable irreducible. Thus we are already on the moral plane
but concurrently on that of bad faith, for it is an ethics which
is ashamed of itself and does not dare speak its name. It has
obscured all its goals in order to free itself from anguish.
Man pursues being blindly by hiding from himself the free
project which is this pursuit. He makes himself such .that he
is waited for by all the tasks placed along his way. Objects are
mute demands, and he is nothing in himself but the passive
obedience to these demands.
Vsk
W(i^r«. H'i/eA “ ,^°ios
s%Z^ ^ a ”:"?' ^0
• ^aj
«*«fen 7;.1 ’^«ie«“^o tte
np lv«,v_ , Psv^u '^^ iruth w
“'^a /d ’2 ^
. ^^a/n ftv*- * "^oiv
IS
are
^ej} 3 ^
^^yref’ ^o ^ ^acf ;? ^ ^ear,„ ifs ^ oq ^
•'^ to f?;? fro« «*tea! S’°“' “>at A°'^ ‘'««Ver/^toc,j,;
' 2 »* 2 ’J»-° 5 ' “■■ ■S' 3 «C of.AtrS'
toe/j? ««« “£ «ffeo,i“ ,°^, 'ie*. ;,f*e an<,
ej-,- . ca„ share, -^S-ia.
fan,y^^se all f/,,* ?^a?
^uai it \ ^pftu ®3cwfil . ^®^Pair-
2 ”< 2 ^ V'sjta'ir
. 2 t? »?.,"«'i;i '•>£x «„
®°^«flc»^®tof/sj;, J?®es of u^suse ti' ooe “oe
fiw °'’st th ^ toe (2/to /(, 7 Of «,o rfi*« »■* ® to’ tto“
'^«eo„.®®to/oav®.''aj« ao, ■.'!’'?<>' cfraf®^; P’®® 0 / 7 °' 6 e fc„_
toa*Tf e 7 £:'to«i „ 7 "?«i/“ tor ®°'>*
to^ >^ar®'®«% toiX® >^^ 5 ,
"^j^oinJi ^PplioJj^ycbn^y.^J- Of ^aii-e
bp;
are
^^hts
and *
and
H'd;
%eo 7 r^^e
2 s?£ 2 ^» 2 » 2 £S 2 ^'S§ 5 '
o/,£?toeos a/*f°«-
»* £>*»
^ts ^ ^
ac 4 . r
*^too 7 .'>Zf? ,-? parrv , 7 °to if^toaeao/
^'® ’’atoe" T'”-
, .. ' 3 ^ 0 .
Jes
toe“>
nd
'’^t'd? toe
<%c 7 ®'®'Ss
“'■'tt to ao;, 7 -'toetf 7 toi
f^overr.!^y
* toe 7 !.Wc^ ^oat>
''to«eT..'^to to
Car,
* " "*^°'*, '’■’Tef^toiog r®^
° ®°o&to 47 ci
®toWa(e?*®
798
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
will freedom, by the very fact that it apprehends itself as a
freedom in relation to itself, be able to put an end to the reign
of this value? In particular is it possible for freedom to take
itself for a value as the source of all value, or must it neces-
sarily be defined in relation to a transcendent value which
haunts it? And in case it could will itself as its own possible
and its determining value, what would this mean? A freedom
which wills itself freedom is in fact a being-which-is-not-
what-it-is and which-is-what-it-is-not, and which chooses as
the ideal of being, being-what-it-is-not and not-being-what-
it-is.
This freedom chooses then not to recover itself but to fl.ee
itself, not to coincide with itself but to be always at a distance
from itself. What are we to understand by this being which
wills to hold itself in awe, to be at a distance from itself? Is
it a question of bad faith or of another fundamental attitude?
And can one live this new aspect of being? In particular will
freedom by taking itself for an end escape all situation? Or on
the contrary, will it remain situated? Or will it situate itself so
much the more precisely and the more individually as it pro-
jects itself further in anguish as a conditioned freedom and ac-
cepts more fully its responsibility as an existent by whom the
world comes into being? All these questions, which refer us
to a pure and not an accessory reflection, can find their reply
only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future
work.
Key to Special Termmology’
Abolition (Oporto-on). The fact of ceasing to exist on the
part of an object. This is, of course, from the point of view
of the For-itself , not of the In-itself since Bemg does not
increase or diminish. , . i
Abschattungen, Used by Sartre in the usual phenomenological
sense to refer to the successive appearances of the object
“in profile.”
Absurd. That which is meaningless. Thus man’s existence is
absurd because his contingency finds no external justifica-
tion. His projects are absurd because they are directed
toward an unattainable goal (the “desire to become God”
or to be simultaneously the free For-itself and the absolute
In-itself) .
Actaeon complex. Totality of images which suggest that
“knowing” is a form of appropriative violation with
sexual overtones.
Anguish. The reflective apprehension of the Self as freedom,
the realization that a nothingness slips in between my Self
^Tr. This far from exhaustiYe list of terms will perhaps be confusing to
the person who has read none of Being and Nothingness and will certainly
appe^ Inadequate to anyone who has completed the volume. I am neverthe-
less mcluding it in the hope that these approximate definitions may serve as
a ^de for readers so that they may thus more easily attain for themselves
a full comprehension of Sartre’s philosophy. I am including here both tech-
nical terms coined by Sartre and familiar words to which he ^ves special
meanings. All direct quotations are from Being and Nothingness.
799
800
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
and my past and future so that nothing relieves me from
the necessity of continually choosing myself and iiothing
guarantees the validity of the values which I choose. Fear is
of something in the world, anguish is anguish before myself
(as in Kierkegaard) .
Apparition (apparition). The coming into existence of an
object. This is only from the point of view of the For-itself
since Being itself neither “comes” nor “goes.”
Appearance (apparition). See “Phenomenon” and “Abschat-
tungen.”
Bad faith. A lie to oneself within the unity of a single con-
sciousness. Through bad faith a person seeks to escape the
responsible freedom of Being-for-itself. Bad faith rests on a
vacillation between transcendence and facticity which re-
fuses to recognize either one for what it really is or to
synthesize them.
Being (etre). “Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what is is.”
Being includes both Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself,
but the latter is the nihUation of the former. As contrasted
with Existence, Being is all-embracing and objective rather
than individual and subjective.
Being-for-itself (etre-pour-soi) . The nihilation of Being-in
itself; consciousness conceived as a lack of Being, a desire
for Being, a relation to Being. By bringing Nothingness
into the world the For-itself can stand out from Being and
judge other beings by knowing what it is not. Each For-
itself is the nihilation of a particular being.
Being-in-itself (etre-en-soi) . Non-conscious Being. It is the
Being of the phenomenon and overflows the knowledge
which we have of it. It is a plenitude, and strictly speaking
we can say of it only that it is.
Being-for-others (etre-pour-autrui) . The third ekstasis (^.v.)
of the For-itself. There arises here a new dimension of
being in which my Self exists outside as an object for
others. The For-others involves a perpetual conflict as
each For-itself seeks to recover its own Being by directly or
indirectly making an object out of the other.
Cause. Occasionally used in the ordinary sense of physicd
cause and effect. In the human sphere cause (motif) is
empty of all deterministic quality and stands for an objec-
tive apprehension of a situation -which in the light of a
certain end may serve as a means for attaining that end.
Coeflflcient of adversity. A term borrowed from Gaston
key to special terminology 801
Bachelard. It refers to the
bv external objects to the project of th “Con-
Co&rtre Jn. that *e pre^eflecuve (see C- ,
sciousness”) is the pre-cognitive basis lor m
is also he says, a sort of cogito concerning the
existence of Others. While we can not abstractly prove Ae
“ eltence, this cogito will disclose to me te
“clcrete, indubitable presence” just as my o™ con-
tingent but necessary existence” has been revealed to me.
Consciousness. The transcending For-itself. “Consciousness
is a being such that in its being, its being is m q^^sUon
in. so far as this being implies a being other than itself.
Like Husserl, Sartre insists that consciousness is always
consciousness of something. He sometimes distinguishes
types of consciousness according to psychic objects; e.g.,
pain-consciousness, shame-consciousness. Two more basic
distinctions are made;
(1) ' Unreflective consciousness (also called non-thetic
consciousness or non-positional self-consciousness). This is
the pre-reflective cogito. Here there is no knowledge but an
implicit consciousness of being consciousness of an object.
(2) Reflective consciousness (also called thetic con-
sciousness or positional self-consciousness). For this see
“reflection.”
Contingency. In the For-itself this equals f acticity, the brute
fact of being this For-itself in the world. The contingency
of freedom is the fact that freedom is not able not to exist.
Dasein. Heidegger’s term for the human being as a conscious
existent. Basic meaning is “Being-there.”
Dissociation , {dedoublement } . The never completed split in
consciousness attempted by consciousness in reflection.
The two parts (if they were separated) would be' the re-
flective consciousness and the consciousness reflected-on.
istraction. An act by which consciousness in order to flee
itself to look on certain of its own future
SriMstrL? ^ actually possibilities of someone
else. Distraction as regards the Past tries to view the Self
personality and to hold that acts are free
Te "choSlrS^^^^ ^voidingT^ee!
generally distraction is anv act
iits otSaSrr'' “““ “>
g02 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Eidetic reduction (Husserl). The process of considering any
object or isolated example of subjectivity as merely an ex-
ample of what it is apart from any affirmation of its actual
existence. Sartre refers to it as meaning simply that “one
can always pass beyond the concrete phenomenon toward
its essence.”
Ekstasis. Used in the original Greek sense of “standing out
from.” The For-itself is separated from its Self in three
successive ekstases:
(1) Temporality. The For-itself nihilates the In-itself
(to which in one sense it still belongs) in the three di-
mensions of past, present, and future (the three temporal
ekstases) .
(2) Reflection. The For-itself tries to adopt an external
point of view on itself.
(3) Being-for-others. The For-itself discovers that it has
a Self for-the-Other, a Self which it is, without ever being
able to know or get hold of it.
Engage (engager) . Includes both the idea of involvement and
the idea of deliberate commitment Thus the human being
is inescapably engaged in the world, and freedom is mean-
ingful only as engaged by its free choice of ends.
Epoche. Husserl’s “putting into parentheses” all ideas about
the existence of the world so as to examine consciousness
independently of the question of any worldly existence.
Sartre, of course, can not follow this procedure since his
task is to examine consciousness in-the-world.
Essence. For Sartre as for Hegel, essence is what has been.
Sartre calls it man’s past. Since there is no pre-established
pattern for human nature, each man makes his essence as
he lives.
Existence. Concrete, individual being here and now. Sartre
says that for all existentialists existence precedes essence.
Existence has for them also always a subjective quality
when applied to human reality.
External negation. “An external bond established between two
beings by a witness.”
Facticity (facticite ) . The For-itself’s necessary connection with
the In-itself, hence with the world and its own past. R is
what allows us to say that the For-itself is or exists. The
facticity of freedom is the fact that freedom is not able
not to be free. ,,
^’nitude. To be carefully distinguished from “mortality.
803
KEY TO SPECIAL TERMINOLOGY
Finitude refers not to the fact that man dies but to
fid that as a free choice of his own project of being, he
makes himself finite by excluding other possibilities each
time that he chooses the one which he prefers. Man
would thus because of his facticity be finite even if im-
Freedom. The very being of the For-itself which is con-
demned to be free” and must forever choose itself— z.c.,
make itself. “ ‘To be free’ does not mean ‘to obtam what
one has wished’ but rather ‘by oneself to determine oneself
to wish’ (in the broad sense of choosing). In other words
success is not important to freedom.”
Future. The “possibles” of the For-itself. The future is what
the For-itself has to be. It is “the determining being which
the For-itself has to be beyond being.”
Historicize (state or quality, “historicity”; active process, “his-
torization”). To become involved as a concrete existent in
an actual world so as to have an “history,”
Human-reality. Sartre’s term for the human being or For-it-
self. Used both generally (like “mankind”) and for the
individual man.
Instant. Sartre denies that time is a succession of instants. The
instant is psychologically important, however, as indicating -
the ever present possibility that the For-itself may at any
point suddenly effect a rupture in its existence by choosing
a new project of being. The instant thus becomes simul-
taneously &e final and the initial terms for the respective
projects.
Internal negation. Found only in connection with the action
of the For-itself. A negation which influences the inner
structure of a being who or which is denied something.
“Such a relation between two beings that the one which is
denied to the other qualifies the other at the heart of its
essence — ^by absence.”
Jonah complex. Irrational desire to assimilate and to identify
with oneself either the object of knowledge or a beloved
' person — without in any way impairing that object’s char-
acter as an external object.
Made-to-be. An unsatisfactory translation of est ete, literally
“is been.” Sartre’s use of the verb “to be” as transitive is,
so far as I know, unique.
Metaphysics. “The study of individual processes which have
given birth to this world as a concrete and particular to-
804 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
tality.” Metaphysics is thus concerned with the problem of
why concrete existents are as they are. Sartre says that meta-
physics is to ontology as history is to sociology.
Mine. “A synthesis of self and not-self.”
Motive {mobile). “The ensemble of the desires, emotions, and
passions which urge me to accomplish a certain act”
Sartre holds that these are freely constituted as a motive,
not psychologically determined.
Nausea. The “taste” of the facticity and contingency of ex-
istence. “A dull and inescapable nausea perpetually reveals
my body to my consciousness.” On the ground of this
fundamental nausea are produced all concrete, empirical
nauseas (caused by spoiled meat, excrement, etc.).
Negatite. Sartre’s word for types of human activity which
while not obviously involving a negative judgment never-
theless contain negativity as an integral part of their struc-
ture; e.g., experiences involving absence, change, interroga-
tion, destruction.
Nihilate {neantir). A word coined by Sartre. Consciousness
exists as consciousness by making a nothingness (^.v.)
arise between it and the object of which it is consciousness.
Thus nihilation is that by which consciousness exists. To
nihilate is to encase with a shell of non-being. The English
word “nihilate” was first used by Helmut Kuhn in his Eitr
counter with Nothingness.
Noema (Husserl). The objective “pole” of conscious experi-
ence viewed after the epoche {q.v.)\ the object intended
by consciousness — as it is in itself plus all its phenomenal
essential features.
Noesis. Husserl’s term for the intentional direction by con-
sciousness toward an object external to iti The intending
act as such with all its essential features.
Nothingness {neant). Nothingness does not itself have Being,
yet it is supported by Being. It comes into the world by the
For-itself and is the recoil from fullness of self-con-
tained Being which allows consciousness to exist as such.
Object-ness {objectite). Not quite objejctivity but rather
the quality or state of being an object. Sometimes objectite
is here translated as “object-state.” “Objectivation” and
“objectivize” are related words and refer to making an ob-
ject out of something or someone.
Ontology. The study “of the structures of being of the existent
taken as a totality.” Ontology describes Being itself, the
805
KEY TO SPECIAL TERMINOLOGY
conditions by which “there is” a world, human reality, etc.
Cf. “Metaphysics.”
Past. What the For-itself has been. The Past thus becomes
Being-in-itself and is the For-itself’s essence and substance
as well as part of its facticity. This is the only sense
in which the For-itself has either essence or substance since
in its living present it' “is what it is not and is not what it
is.”
Phenomenon. Being as it appears or is revealed. Sartre uses
. the word in its usual phenomenological sense though he
differs in, his view of the transphenomenality of Being. He,
of course, denies any distinction between phenomena and
noumena.
- Phenomenology. In general in speaking of the theory of phe-
nomenology Sartre refers to the work of Husserl. It should
, be noted, however, that in spite of many points of disagree-
' ' ment with Husserl, Sartre considers his own work a phe-
nomenological study. When he says that an idea merits
' phenomenological investigation, he means, of course, a
study conducted according to his own method.
, Possibilize (possibilise) . Refers to the free act by which con-
' sciousness constitutes an action as capable of being per-
formed or an attitude as capable of being assumed.
Possible (possible). A noun almost equal to “possibility.”
Sartre generally prefers “possible,” which signifies a con-
crete action to be performed in a concrete world rather than
an abstract idea of possibility in general. The For-itself
makes itself by choosing its possibles and projecting itself
toward those preferred.
Presence. Concerns the relation of the For-itself to the rest
of Being and involves an internal negation. “Presence to
is an internal relation between the being which
is present and the being to which it is present.” “The
For-itself is presence to all of Being-in-itself” by making
Being-in-itself “exist as a totality.”
Present. The Present is not. The For-itself is presence to
Being-in-itself by means of an internal negation. But this
, very presence is a flight toward the Future as a further
project of the For-itself.
Presentation. T^at which is present to the mind as an -ob-
ject of consciousness.. Sometimes distinguished from repre-
sentation. When this distinction is observed, presentation
806
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
refers to actual objects of which the mind is conscious,
representation to imaginary ones. .
Probability. A potentiality which refers back to the object
though it is not made by the object nor does it have to be.
It belongs to the In-itself whereas possibility lies in the
province of the For-itself.
Project. Both verb and noun. It refers to the For-itself’s choice
of its way of being and is expressed by action in the light
of a future end.
Reflection {reflet). In the dyad “reflection-reflecting,” the
form in which the For-itself founds its own nothingness.
“The For-itself can be only in the mode of a reflection
causing itself to be reflected as not being a certain being.”
In other words consciousness exists as a translucent con-
sciousness of being other than the objects of which it is
consciousness. .
Reflection (reflexion). The attempt on the part of conscious-
ness to become its own object. “Reflection is a type of being
in which the For-itself is in order to be to itself^ what it
is.” There are two types.
( 1 ) Pure reflection. The presence of the reflective, con-
sciousness to the consciousness reflected-on. This requires
a Katharsis effected by consciousness on itself.
(2) Impure (accessory) reflection. The constitution of
“psychic temporality,” the For-itselE’s contemplation of its
psychic states. . - -
Representation. See “Presentation.”
Responsibility. “Consciousness (of) being the incontestable
author of an event or an object.” , . r
Serious. The “Spirit of seriousness” {V esprit de serieux) views
man as an object and subordinates him to the world. It
thinks of values as having an absolute existence indepen-
dent of human-reality.
Situation. The For-itself’s engagement in the world. It is the
product of both facticity and the For-itself’s way of
accepting anff acting upon its facticity.
Space. “The nothingness of relation apprehended as a rela-
tion by the being which is its own relation.” Space is
primarily subjective because it is the result of- -the For-
itself s act of organizing relations between external objects
always in the light of the For-itself’s own ends.
Survey, project of surveying (survoler, survol). Process of
thought or perception such that objects are grasped in a ,
807
KEY TO SPECIAL TERMINOLOGY
global act and can not be separated into points or instants.
Temporality. Subjective process whereby the For-itself con-
tinuously lives its project of nihilating the In-itself.
Through temporality the For-itself sets up its own measure
for the duration and self-identity of things. Time is not
in -things but flows over them. The For-itself as what it has
been (Past) is a flight (Present) toward what it projects to
be (Future).
“There is” y a). Used by Sartre to indicate that the world
and objects exist as a world and as objects rather than
as meaningless, undifferentiated Being-in-itself. The “there
is” results, of course, from the upsurge into Being on the
pah of the For-itself.
Transcendence. Often refers simply to the process whereby
the For-itself goes beyond the given in a further project of
itself. Sometimes the For-itself is itself called a transcen-
dence. If I make an object out of the Other, then he is for
me a transcendence-transcended. On the other hand, the
Being-in-itself _ which overflows all its appearances and
all attempts of mine to grasp it is called a transcendent
Being. The word “transcendence” is sometimes purely a
substantive, sometimes refers to a process.
Transphenomenality. Refers to the fact that Being although
co-extensive with its appearance is not limited to it, that
Being “surpasses the knowledge which we have of it and
provides the basis for such knowledge.”
Unrealizable. An ideal which although by nature unattain-
able dominates human conduct as man strives to realize
this goal. Sartre uses this for ideals common to all human
reality, not for concrete, individual goals which might be
realized by some people and not by others.
Value. In general value arises as the For-itself constitutes
objects as desirable. More specifically value is the “beyond
of all surpassings as the For-itself seeks to be united with
its Self.” It is what the For-itself lacks in order to be itself.
World. The whole of non-conscious Being as it appears to
the For-itself and is organized by the For-itself in “in-
strumental complexes.” Because of its facticity the For-
itself Js inescapably engaged in the world. Yet strictly
speaking, without the For-itself, there would be not a world
but only an undifferentiated plenitude of Being.
Index
Abraham, 458
Adler, ix n., xxxiii, xliv, 98,
591, 609, 768, 782
Aga-Khan, 371
Alain, 12, 13, 60, 93, 705
Aristotle, 145, 150, 154, 626
Audiberti, 766
Bachelard, ix, n, xlii, 428, 765,
767, 768, 800, 801
Bacon, 738
Baldwin, 435
Balzac, 690, 692, 750
Barr^, 688
Berger, 566
Bergson, 43, 81, 82, 161-163,
166, 192, 194, 232, 237,
519, 573, 595, 639, 647,
702, 778
Berkeley, 9, 10, 67, 203
Biran, de, 402, 427
Boisselot, xxxvi, 689
Borgo, di, 227
Bourget, 713, 719
Brentano, 61
Brice-Parain, 662 n.
Broglie, 406
Caldwell, ix n.
C6zanne, 258
Chardonne, 98
Chevallier, 166, 167
Clapar^de, 161, 163
Clovis, 575, 577, 578
Comte, 417, 718
Constantine, 559, 560, 576, 577
Cousin, 121
Couturat, 149
Croce, ix n.
Descartes, xi, xii, 9, 13, 17, 20
n., 23, 33, 63, 119, 127,
132, 133, 139, 152, 158,
162, 163, 173, 189-94,
212, 219, 231, 264, 286,
314, 321, 330, 338, 339,
376, 404, 409, 566, 569,
595, 599, 619, 622, 669,
736, 743, 753
Diderot, 689
Dilthey, 306
Dostoevsky, 69, 734
Duhem, 5
Duns Scotus, 668, 669
Einstein, 286, 681, 794
Eliot, XXXV n.
Epicurus, xxxiii, 154, 520, 583
EucUd, 589
Faulkner, ix n., 526
Fitzgerald, 286
Flaubert, 713-17, 734, 750
Freud, xxxiii, xxxvii, xliii, xliv,
31, 92, 95, 590, 591, 722,
727, 729, 734, 756, 768,
780
Gide, 101, 355, 576, 595, 612,
738
Grene, xxxix n.
Grimm, 766
Halbwachs, 658
Hamelin, 45
Hegel, ix n., xxii n., xxviii, 44
50, 52, 53, 60, 72, 109, 114,
122, 124, 135, 145, 170,
175, 217, 256, 315-319,
331, 338, 339, 363, 365,
377, 397, 482, 563, 597,
691, 723, 739, 762, 802
Daladier, 766 n.
Desan, xxix n., xl, xlv
809
810
INDEX
Heidegger, ix n., xxviii-xxx, 4, 7,
13. 15, 24, 25, 34, 50, 53,
55, 59. 61. 65. 80, 88, 120,
128, 133, 157, 180, 181,
202, 251, 272, 275, 315,
330-34, 336, 391, 428, 485,
498, 536, 552, 556, 565,
593, 613, 620, 623, 634,
680, 682, 684. 697, 698,
721, 801
Heisenberg, 406
Heraclitus, 172
Hugo, 750
Hume, 189, 427
Husserl, x, xii, xix, xxiv, 4, 5, 7,
10, 11, 15, 18, 20, 23, 33,
34, 38, 61, 62, 75, 119,
121, 122, 132, 133, 152,
162, 176, 192, 212, 215,
240, 258, 264, 315, 321,
329, 331, 344, 346, 363,
416, 428, 501, 566, 582,
599, 725, 795, 801, 802,
804
James, ix, xlv, 161, 612 n., 778
Janet, 610, 613
Jaspers, 715
Jeanson, x n., li
Jonson, 739 n.
Joyce, 588
Jung, xliv
Kafka, ix n., 355, 356, 644, 703
Kant, 4, 6, 17, 18, 34, 37, 55,
106, 119, 128, 182, 188-94,
203, 204, 210, 296, 306-309,
311,312,316-318.333, 335,
336, 340, 529, 558, 617,
744
Kessel, 101
Kierkegaard, xxxiv, xxxv, 65,
145 n., 324, 741, 800
Kretschmer, 459
Kuhn, 804
Laclos, 495
Lafayette, 694
Laiande, 258, 337
Laplace, 185
Laporle, 33, 45, 435
Lautrcamont, 767
Lawrence, 98
Lefebvre, 44 n,
Leibniz, xxxv, 128, 129, 146,
148, 149, 192-94, 203, 204,
314, 602-04, 689
Lc Scnnc, 45
Leucippus, 398
Lewin, 372, 407
Lot, 576
Louis XV, 696
Louis XVUI, 645
Malebranche, 336
Malraux, ix n., 165, 169, 365,
558, 681, 682, 691, 698 ,
Man, de, 658
Marx, k n,, 321, 658, 741
Mauriac, 98, 633, 692
Meyerson, 196, 284, 685
Mill, 234
Montfort, dc, 669
Napoleon, 227, 645
Natanson, 57
Newton, 406
Nietzsche, ix a., 4, 692
Parmenides, 399, 782
Pascal, 692, 719
Paulhan, 660, 663
PMHp n, 127
Piaget, 13
Pisrcfi 92
Plato, X, xxvii, xxviii, xxxiii, 61,
98. 132, 369, 409, 786, 787
Poe, 764. 767
Poincar6, 5, 193, 381
Politzer, 702
Preyer, 734
Proudhon, 749
Proust, 4, 6, 98, 164, 189, 229,^
234-36, 372, 457, 458, 478,
569, 719
Raymond VI, 669
811
INDEX
I Richelieu, 696 yl!
iRilke, 681, 682 Z- -
IRimbaud, 764, 767 /,.
iRobespierre, 696 /
|Romains, 536, 708 Ji
|Rougemont, de, 5S7t\
^Rousseau, 246, 493 iu, 530
I
■*^acher-Masoch, 493
§t. Anselm, 9
Salacrou, ix n.
garment, 98
Spaier, 62
Spinoza, xxvi' t^' SOi^n.,- 34, 47,
49, 122,‘l23;Ji3't^l48, 212,
222, 256, 306, 557,
- 562, 673, 7 Is, Hq, 792,
793 ■<:.?»
Stekel, 95 ; 1 1
Stendhal, 109, 719, 7m '
Stem, ix n.
Taine, 62
If /
-Toulouse, de,'669^‘
Scheler, 87, 143, 435, 436, 501,
767
|Schiller, 738
,|Schlumberger, 640
fSchnitzler, ix n.
ISchopenhauer, xxx, 311, 319
ISechelles, de, 495
Socrates, 49
SoUier, 467
1 Sophocles, 169, 687, 692
''Tfencavei.'ide, 669
Valery, 42, 103, 109
Verville, de, 495
Waehlens, de, 486 n.
Wahl, 529
Watson, 311
Wellington, 42
Zeno, 288
ABOUT THKW
„ 'to 1905, leai-piul S%e graduated the
« i°^^al^Sup8rieure at the ageVf tiWtwo. He sub-
Bcole ^r ^ the'L>tcee]lu Havre, studied
a933-^^ 1'®'^ ^ professorship w°m H
atjhd ou^& of World Witt If.
„„S»virrntii +hft:liPrench Arm^^mta his capture at the
f T nine months m a Ger- ;
and directed plays for
his feUow prisoners. On his release in 1941, Sartre joined^ the
Paris Resistance movement as a journalist, °°
various underground newspapers, mcludmg Les Lettres F
gaises Combat. Despite the Nazi pen^P
Occupation, he produced his first play m 1943, Les Mouches
{The Flies), a retelling of the Orestes legend advocating ire
dom and resistance to tyranny. His second play, Bmt-cios
(No Exit), was produced a year later. His first major work, a
novel. La Naus6e (Nausea), was published m 1938;
major philosophic work, UEtre et le Neant (Being and Notn-
ingness), appeared in 1943.
In 1942 Sartre resigned his professorship to devote run
time to writing. Asserting that a writer must refuse to allow
himself to be classified as an institution, he rejected appoint-
ment to the French Legion d’Honneur in 1945, and rejecte ^
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. He one of the '
major artists and writers in France to demand independence
for Algeria, and in 1965 declined a lecture tour in the Unite
States in protest of the American military role in Vietnam.
Sartre’s writings include novels, plays, screenplays, essays
on literature and psychology, a philosophical and sociologies
biography of the French playwri^t Genet, ^ pMosopmc
treatises, articles of social comment,^‘y and his autobiograph)^ ■
He was the editor of Les Temps Modernes, which he founded
in 1946. His last major work was a multivolume biography of
Gustave Flaubert He died in Paris in 1980. A major spokes-
man of existentialism and, a major social critic associated
with the political Left, Sartre was one of the few philosoph^s
to develop a complete system of thought cor^istent with the
ethical and philosophical dilemmas of his tune.
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American Libraries
TV News
Understanding 9/11